Ye Olde Staging Point

I'm back from the Chicago conference, which occupied much of last week and the weekend. The conference has weighed heavily enough on my mind lately that it'll be a bit before I'm up to posting anything resembling a worthwhile blog entry. In the meantime you're stuck with these oh-so-fascinating ramblings:

• The Conference. This went fairly well, as far as conferences go. My usual dilemma at conferences is that I tend to be really, really terrible at "mingling," which is one of the major purposes of these conferences. Interacting in a crowd of people for more than about 30 minutes leaves me feeling something akin to exhaustion, like I need to go rest and recover for a few hours. (I'm reminded of a recent pcg post about introverts, to which I respond "tell it like it is, brother!") This fear-of-social-interaction thing usually begins to wear off by Day 2 or 3 of the conference--so right about when I'm starting to feel really comfortable with the idea of going up to people and introducing myself, the conference comes to an end. I guess I need to work on that, or something.

  Oh, and having Michele with me at the conference was very, very cool.

• Fighting with Michele. No, not the why-didn't-you-take-out-the-trash-like-I-asked kind of fighting--this kind. We rented Soul Calibur II last night and had fun playing it. Michele had to stop after a while when the Gamecube controller caused a giant blister to form on her thumb. I think those years of playing Ikari Warriors (A,B,B,A!) and Tecmo Super Bowl on the original blocky NES controller (not exactly the most comfortable in the world) must have given me pretty substantial protective callouses on my thumbs. In time, I am confident that Michele's digits will undergo the reactive biological evolution necessary to protect them from the dreaded Gamer Thumb.

  Michele has also played way past me in Eternal Darkness--maybe she'll blog about that one sometime in the future.

• Choosing a church home. We've been waffling a lot on picking a church to be our church home here in Grand Rapids. On the surface, the prospect of having hundreds of churches in the area from which to choose sounds pretty exciting--I mean, with all those choices, you're bound to find the perfect one, right? Well, maybe. The reality is that there's nothing quite so spiritually frustrating as finding yourself comparing-and-contrasting church 'features' as if you were shopping around for a refrigerator or something. Oooh, I just love the sermons at Church X, but they just don't do liturgy as well as Church Y. The music at Church Z is perfect, if only the font they used in the bulletin weren't so annoying. That sort of thing. Michele and I have sort of set a deadline for choosing a church home; I guess now is when we just make sure we're open for God to point us in the right direction.

I warned you this would be rambling and non-insightful.

(cue Emperor music)

Only now, at the end, do you understand.