Welcome back! Hope you enjoyed your weekend.

Another weekend has come and gone.

I didn’t have Youth Group on Friday, which was a nice treat. I love going to Youth Group, and hanging out with those kids, but it’s also nice to have a Friday off once in a while. The reason that I didn’t have Youth Group was because—

Actually, if I’m going to explain that, I need to take a step back. There is a group who works out of our church building, called Urban Promise. They work with youth in “at-risk” communities where the kids don’t have a lot of opportunities; they have an after-school program, that helps kids with homework, as well as a bunch of other things (summer camps and Spring Break camps, etc.) One of the programs they put on is called YMAD (Youth Making A Difference; they pronounce it “why mad”), which meets on Friday nights, about the same time that the Youth Group normally meets. A bunch of the kids who are in my Youth Group are also involved in YMAD, as volunteer leaders. So the reason we cancelled Youth Group on Friday was that YMAD was going to the circus, and most of the kids that normally come to Youth Group were going with them.

So what did I do with my unexpected freedom, you might ask? Well... nothing, really. Andrea wasn’t feeling very well, so we just stayed in. I got some reading done, probably watched a bit of TV, and that’s about it. The rest of the weekend was about the same.

I was reading Raymi’s blog the other day, and I noticed an MSN Conversation that she posted, in which she was the only one who said anything. This got me thinking: I can put up a lot more MSN conversations if I just cut out the middle man and talk to myself! I mean, I only put up conversations under the following circumstances:

1. The conversation is interesting to me
2. The other person gives me permission
3. I have time
4. I remember to—sometimes I close the message window before I think about it, and then curse at myself for not saving it (and asking permission)

But if I just talk to myself, I can do it a lot more often!

And that’s about it. I saw most of Amadeus last night. Meh. I know that it won a bunch of awards and stuff, back in the day, but I wasn’t too into it. However, it could be because I’m looking back on it from more than 20 years later—it’s hard for a movie to stand the test of time like that. I’ve been waiting to see Hotel Rwanda for a month or two—we have it recorded on the PVR—but every time I suggest it Andrea doesn’t want to watch it. Which means it will probably also be forever until I can see The Constant Gardener—the first movie I’ve actually anticipated watching in a long time. (Of course, I think the last one I anticipated was The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which probably wasn’t that popular, so I’m not expecting people to trust my judgement in movies.)

And that’s about it. My calendar looks pretty good for the rest of the day, so who knows? Maybe I’ll be posting again, later on. Only time will tell...