I’m back from the dead.

A quick recap:

• New Orleans Mission Trip – Great success, hundreds of pictures soon available (and that’s not an exaggeration).
• Food Poisoning – 12 hours of near continuous technicolor screams was the best (or worst) ab workout I’ve ever had.
• Office Space Construction – I have a ceiling again and it appears to be obediently staying above my desk, instead of raining down on it like it did last week.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m painfully behind on my projects at work. Thankfully, there are no hard deadlines right now, but it would be nice to use the word “finished” in a status meeting in the month of April, since it didn’t happen in March.

Next week is Glenview’s 2nd annual mission to New Orleans. This year I, along with about 120 other church members, will be rebuilding the city. Last year we split our forces between demolition of ruined houses and building new ones. This year the demolition is pretty much done, so we’ll all be building.

The reason I mention this is that I am really out of shape and it concerns me. I haven’t been on my bike since last Fall. It’s been longer than that since my last real rock climbing. I’m worried that five straight days of hoisting sheet rock is going to kick my butt. But it’s too late now to do any strength training.

That brings me to this week’s white board quip. It’s from a Twitter post that my friend Dave wrote.

Started doing yoga last night… Way more grunting and farting than anticipated.

I’ve never done yoga, but I have so been there and done that!

Almost every Christmas and Easter, when my church puts on our holiday shows, I get made fun of for the fact that I can’t grow a beard. I end up either playing Pontius Pilot or just looking stupid with stage-make-up stubble.

But when push comes to shove (or steel comes to face) I get the last laugh.

I shave religiously every Tuesday and Friday using a 20¢ Bic disposable and water. No cream, no soap, no fancy expensive blade. And the result is a baby smooth face with no rash or burning or cuts.

Challenge my manhood if you will, but my face feels great!

For the rest of you, my buddy Dave wrote a blog post about his luxurious shaving style.

Construction has picked up in the office space next door. Today the noise has reached a new high point.

After I tweeted about it, I didn’t feel I had achieved the catharsis I was looking for, so I got out my Treo cell phone and recorded the sound in my office. Remember that the microphone on my cell phone is designed to pick up a nice loud voice an inch away, so what you are about to hear is much quieter than the actual noise level. You can just barely hear the Spanish crooning in the first few seconds, while I can hear every lovely word of it.

Clicky clicky to get the MP3 sound file.

The title of this post does not mean that I am having digestive problems. Rather it is that the internet connection at the office today is not behaving as expected. My trillian chat client has been beeping and bopping incessantly as my connections to MSN and Yahoo go up and down. Surfing is impossible as pages will partially load, or not load at all.

*sigh* Has my life grown so shallow that I can’t survive without watching the latest video or reading the latest web comic?

Yes. Yes it has.

Now leave me alone. You’ll get your white board quip tomorrow. In the mean time, I’ve got many many web sites to continually refresh as I attempt to get my fix.

This is going to be another low traffic week for me. Very little surfing which leads to very little blogging. I’m redoubling (quadrupling??) my efforts at work.

This week is our annual distributor conference. Most of our international distribution partners will be here in Texas and the marketing and executive folks will be all tied up talking about sales strategies and quarterly gross differential margin analysis (read as, “stuff I know nothing about”). But for me that means that this week should be fairly uninterrupted by problems with the web site. The “squeaky wheels”, so to speak, will be otherwise occupied.

And all that explains this week’s white board quip.

I can’t because I’m all busy eating a carrot stick.
– Dilbert

Last weekend Tammy and I made the drive to Amarillo. Much of the family was in town and it was good to do some catching up.

We all came to see “Willy Wonka Junior” performed by the Lamplight Youth Theatre on stage at Amarillo’s relatively new theater, the Globe News Center. (The venue is really cool; pretty classy for Amarillo.) But the real attraction was my nephew Caleb Spaw.

Caleb played Augustus Gloop. True, he was the first kid to be consumed by his bad behavior in Wonka’s homicidal factory, but it was still a big honor. He got the part primarily because he was able to pick up the German accent in a snap. Seems he shares some genes with his nutty uncle who also has a knack for accents. (I’m so proud!!)

Caleb sang several songs did a bit of dancing and, most importantly, never dropped his accent! (The girl playing Veruca Salt was only British for two or three of her lines. The rest was decidedly Texan.)

The show was very entertaining and the production was impressive for an all volunteer children’s theater.

In case you’re interested, the rest of the pictures I took can be downloaded in a zip file.

So far this year, I’ve failed miserably at one of my resolutions: to memorize 52 Bible verses in 2008. So far I’m at zero. The good news is our church is testing out a new curriculum that includes scripture memory. Now I can finally start wrestling that particular demon. Which brings us to this weeks white board quip.

I tried to wrestle my demons once, but they used too many illegal holds.
Steven Wright

I just want to say that Superbowl XLII was what superbowls are supposed to be like. Down to the last play, nail-biting excitement. And to top it all off, the team I was rooting for won.

We watched the game, as usual, with a dozen or so middle school kids from our church. And there was plenty of the usual teen-angst fueled, “Oh yeah?” and “Nuh-huh!” going back and forth about who would win. The vocal minority was supporting the Pats, while all the adults and a quieter majority of the kids were pulling for the Giants. There were some pretty interesting, non-monetary bets being offered, which I managed to avoid.

I was pulling for the Giants, first and foremost because my good friend and former co-worker Dave O’Hara had family pride involved. Dave’s younger brother Shaun is the Giant’s starting center (#60). I’ve met Shaun and he’s a great guy. I had other reasons, but none worth sharing.

None of us could believe how low-scoring the game was. Both defenses were really amazing. There were remarkably few penalties, no time wasted with calls being reviewed, and just enough “big” plays. (I *loved* the Manning to Tyree magic that would have impressed Houdini himself.)

I also had high hopes for the commercials this year. It seemed like the lull of the last few years might be over and some real stand-outs would show up.

It was nice that there didn’t seem to be lot of “skintillation” this year. One Vicky’s Secret ad, and even that wasn’t bad. Although, there was the guy starting a car with his man-boobs.

The Planters unibrow girl was great. Coke’s parade balloon battle was clever. eTrade took a risk with the talking baby but overcame the talking-baby-creepiness factor by making a creepiness reference. Still, the spit-up one was a little over the edge for me. Doritos gets the “Wha??” Award for their giant mouse attack. And I would normally change channels for a Pepsi ad featuring Justin Timberlake, but when Timberlake takes a good beating, I’ll allow it.

I have to say I had a difficult tie for first place. Bridgestone’s screaming squirrel had me in stitches. (My favorite was the scream from the grasshopper. “eeeeeeehh!”) And Tide’s talking stain was awesome. (“Blemalablulalahilola!”) It’s just too close to call a clear winner.

Honorable mentions also include Tiny Head, Richard Simmons Run-Down, Godfather Car, Carrier Pigeons, and Thriller lizards (only because of the pop culture reference).

And I’ll go out of my way to say I didn’t like CareerBuilder’s Heart. It was… I don’t know… too gross I guess.

Between rehearsing for the dessert theater show (which is actually a show within a show where I play an upstart professional actor) and listening to Steve Martin’s autobiography, I’ve got myself feeling all artsy.

Steve, it turns out, was a genuine 60’s hippy and growing up around L.A. he was acquainted with all sorts of famous musicians, writers, and artists. When he started name dropping, I didn’t know most of the names, so I googled them the other day and spent a good hour or so looking through paintings and photography by that era’s movers and shakers.

I’ve always wanted to be an artist, but I have this affinity for eating and paying my rent that prevents me from living that lifestyle. When we lived in Colorado, I took hundreds of photographs (No, not pictures. Photographs.) most of which are really good. But since moving back to Texas, I find that there are painfully few chances to cast a lense on something worth looking at. Not to say there’s not art here. It’s just a lot harder to find and I’m way to busy to find it.

The digital age makes it seem illogical to put any effort into shooting with my old 35mm Canon Rebel. But the $600+ price tag on a comparable digital Rebel not justifiable. Maybe if I still lived in the mountains.

*deep sigh*

Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to keep the frustrated artist inside of me hidden away, festering.