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So.. on Tuesday night we sat down (YFA, Eric and I) and watched the Worship Band Workshop DVD (led by Paul Baloche) and it was short.. but had a lot of good ideas.

Baloche starts of course with the main reason for worship and where our hearts ought to be. Nothing completely new, but the DVD has a lot of promise to inspire the NTCAC worship teams to a higher level of musical standard (somewhere above noise.. I kid). The greatest is the two counter-examples that the band plays.. one is of NO dynamics (haha hello NTCAC!) and the second is of inconsistent tempo (hello NTCAC again! except we dont slow down again).

Baloche presents some basic ideas, but hopefully in a way that those who aren’t so dedicated/committed to worship will at least get some kind of clue. He talks about not playing so much, about playing bass/mids/treble and staying out of each other’s way. They’re pretty simple and I think we could implement them in a fairly rudimentary way. The biggest culprit at NTCAC is definitely the piano (bass/guitar/drums tend to stay out of each other’s way naturally) playing all over the place.. and way too much.

Anyhow.. last night I watched the band interviews (only 10 mins :() and they also reinforce some good things, like being spiritually supportive of the leader, being attentive etc. Just things which should be “common sense” but really need to be reinforced.

The only downside of the DVD was the 15-20mins which were just Baloche’s team playing songs.. and taking up valuable talking time :p

It was pretty funny after watching it, Eric saw the “light” and was really gung ho on setting a high standard, a level of musical ability that we should strive for.. and YFA kinda reminded him how he just shot down the whole idea at the EWC meeting a week ago. In about 15 minutes Eric went through exactly the same thought progression that we’ve been going through, except we could quickly explain why it wasn’t possible.. and what middle ground we settled at heh.

It really all comes down to committment and heart. I mean.. talent or no talent, if you don’t even commit to the team, to practicing, to the ministry.. then it’s not going to happen by itself by “God’s grace”.. My countdown of.. 1 and 1/2 year until we can form a TPX worship team is on the wall :p

· Opera star abruptly quits stage – and production
· Jeans-clad understudy steps in and wins ovation

Haha go understudy!

for cutie! i used this frosh’s ipod for studying the other night and decided to try death cab for cutie, this indie (underground) ish band, but they’re pretty popular, the album is “the photo album’ mmm sooo good! that i’ve been listening to it for a few days now, and i just got a few more albums, trying to get more, they’re not too loud, but not too soft, really good for studying or just …EZlistening, and they’ve quite some variety in arrangements of the song, so try it out!

on another note, it is the calm before the storm, 7pm monday, GG.

So I’m back in Toronto again. Seattle was definitely fun but Toronto feels more like home still. Although the line is definitely blurring.
Real estate is insanely expensive in Seattle. Guys, you really need to save up if you intend to buy your own property one day – no amount of savings seem enough.
This trip created more questions than answers. So many options and alternatives I can take … life is full of choices, what can I say.
On a lighter side, I went to the Nintendo North American headquarters to get a Wii component cable for sadd3j. I was going to ask him if he wanted one first, but I figured he most likely would want it so I was going to get it for him as a surprise. Little do I know, surprises for jon are hard to pull off. The day after I bought the cable he messages me and says “I want to order the Wii component cable” and I was “…” and said dumb reasons like “oh don’t get it, so expensive” or something :S In the end I told him he’s stupid and he shouldn’t get it 😛 haha.
Some pictures from the Nintendo Headquarters. Note the Wii Play shirt! I was going to get one (only $10USD or so) but I don’t even own a Wii 😛

in writing a response to yfa’s post regarding seattle and the work and effort, i decided maybe i’ll kill a bit more time by posting something short, time: 9:57am friday, if i stay till 2:30pm, then i’ll have been at stauffer library for >24hrs, if i stay till 8:30pm and don’t go out, i’ll have been inside stauffer library for over 24hrs without stepping foot outside at all, which i doubt i’ll do because i need some coffee.

anyways, in response to yfa, yeah, stress about where to go in life, i sometimes look and see how you’ve got everything ‘set’ and/or ‘planned’ and sometimes i wish i had that too, but perhaps its because my marks are crap (but i dont like to believe its marks that hold me back….because i think if you are good at something you’d be able to excel in it in the work place), or maybe its because its biochemistry, something i REALLY don’t care about, its pretty unanimous, the overall consensus is ‘why are you in biochemistry?’, and i still have no answer to that question, and seeing lincoln study all night for some biochem400course as i slept the few hours on the couch, his one message for me was ‘get out of biochemistry while you still can’, how encouraging.

i’m not sure, i’m not sure about anything, there’s never any guarantees in life, no guarantee’s in people, school, work. when things seem to go okay for a while, something else hits, what i DO know is that HE has some sort of plan, which i think is quite comforting,

sidestory: talking to sam a few weeks ago, we got talking about how neither of us know the frosh (her at utccf) and me at kccf (although last few days i’ve gotten to know a few, theres a guy from HK who uses a MBP so as my break i went and showed him a few cool programs), but yeah, sam was saying how many of the frosh are overly keen about school etc, and i was saying, last year i told the frosh (whenever they’d be stressing crazy), “(insert name), is the God you serve not bigger than these exams? these marks? these double digit numbers that *somehow* is a ‘fair’ assessment of your knowledge?” and sam’s response was, ‘well i don’t want them to cry’ and i was thinking, but why would you cry? isn’t that so comforting? to know you have hope in something else?

i guess it’s all perspective, and faith. from a TPview, watching others stress and telling them not to stress is easy, but from the firstperson’s view, they just gotta build up faith. and how can you build faith?, by being continually tested. look at the men of faith in the Bible, how many times were they tested and failed at times. its cool to see them and be like ‘wow i wish i were ______’, but also crazier to remember that they went through so many trials.

in short, this post really is a collection of random thoughts, perhaps some editing would be nice, but no time for that!