Realizing that my last several blog entries have been very serious, I thought I'd try to lighten things up a bit. I found these on another blog and thought they were worth sharing for a laugh...
Thanks, Rain!
Best Wishes,
Allen
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Friday, September 29, 2006
Monday, July 24, 2006
Youthfest 2006
Picture of 2003 Youthfest
Last weekend was full and fun and exhausting...but worth it. Our church sponsored the 2006 Youthfest in Austin, Texas, a two-day event with live music, good food, skits, guest speakers and the preaching of the Gospel. Over the course of the six hour event on Saturday and four hour event on Sunday, hundreds of youth and their parents, of all nationalities, attended.
The Mayor Pro-Tem, a City Council member and others gave encouraging speeches to the youth. There were also activities for the youth, including face painting and some fun mascots (two church sisters dressed up as a star and as a candle -- very cute). There were also vendors like The River 102.3 FM and the local community college and at least half a dozen others.
It made the local tv news and got some photos in the local newspaper and its website. But most importantly, by the end of the event, 8 people gave their lives to Jesus Christ!
First Light performed 2 songs on both days to enthusiastic response, which was wonderful. You can hear the two songs we performed on the First Light My Space site (link above), "You Were There" and "Hold On" (both recorded at the 2003 Youthfest (pictured above).
There are a couple of unique things I'd like to mention about the event. The first was that this was an event by a church made up of many interracial couples. That's just the way our nondenominational church is, welcoming of and loving all nations. Secondly, every musical group has bilingual songs that include Spanish.
One of the best moments of the event for me was during one of the songs on Sunday by our church's Youth Choir. A young married couple sang a duet that was backed up by the choir. They sang the first verse and chorus in English and it was well-received. And then they broke into a Spanish version of the first verse and chorus and got enthusiastic clapping from Hispanic (obviously Spanish-speaking) attendees in the audience. And then the whole choir sang in Spanish supporting the lead singer -- and you could just tell, there was such appreciation for what was being said. The song is called "And They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love."
The church set up a projection system that acted like a big screen tv so people in the back could see what was happening on stage. And we had several cameramen from different angles recording the whole event. And I think it was recorded for CD, too (hopefully).
It was a lot of work and we're still tired and sore, especially after all the moving (which is now 100% complete)...but as I said at the beginning, it was all worth it. We did Youthfest in 2003 and 2004, now in 2006 and we hope to have another one next year.
Best Wishes,
Allen
Picture of 2003 Youthfest
Last weekend was full and fun and exhausting...but worth it. Our church sponsored the 2006 Youthfest in Austin, Texas, a two-day event with live music, good food, skits, guest speakers and the preaching of the Gospel. Over the course of the six hour event on Saturday and four hour event on Sunday, hundreds of youth and their parents, of all nationalities, attended.
The Mayor Pro-Tem, a City Council member and others gave encouraging speeches to the youth. There were also activities for the youth, including face painting and some fun mascots (two church sisters dressed up as a star and as a candle -- very cute). There were also vendors like The River 102.3 FM and the local community college and at least half a dozen others.
It made the local tv news and got some photos in the local newspaper and its website. But most importantly, by the end of the event, 8 people gave their lives to Jesus Christ!
First Light performed 2 songs on both days to enthusiastic response, which was wonderful. You can hear the two songs we performed on the First Light My Space site (link above), "You Were There" and "Hold On" (both recorded at the 2003 Youthfest (pictured above).
There are a couple of unique things I'd like to mention about the event. The first was that this was an event by a church made up of many interracial couples. That's just the way our nondenominational church is, welcoming of and loving all nations. Secondly, every musical group has bilingual songs that include Spanish.
One of the best moments of the event for me was during one of the songs on Sunday by our church's Youth Choir. A young married couple sang a duet that was backed up by the choir. They sang the first verse and chorus in English and it was well-received. And then they broke into a Spanish version of the first verse and chorus and got enthusiastic clapping from Hispanic (obviously Spanish-speaking) attendees in the audience. And then the whole choir sang in Spanish supporting the lead singer -- and you could just tell, there was such appreciation for what was being said. The song is called "And They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love."
The church set up a projection system that acted like a big screen tv so people in the back could see what was happening on stage. And we had several cameramen from different angles recording the whole event. And I think it was recorded for CD, too (hopefully).
It was a lot of work and we're still tired and sore, especially after all the moving (which is now 100% complete)...but as I said at the beginning, it was all worth it. We did Youthfest in 2003 and 2004, now in 2006 and we hope to have another one next year.
Best Wishes,
Allen
Thursday, July 20, 2006
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New Logos?
Since I was getting tired of text and haven't had time to re-upload the original logos to IR Haven, I went ahead and made some new ones online. What do you think? Do you like these or did you prefer the old ones more? Let me know!
Move update: The duplex is almost entirely cleaned out now, btw. I had no idea we had so much junk in the garage! Amazing...
Logo update, later in the day: After looking at the original logos again, I decided they were better. I uploaded them to Photobucket and linked them back here. So, although change is good, in this case, I think it's better not to mess with a "classic" look (at least till I come up with something better).
I put the "alternative versions" in thumbnail format with this post (click each thumbnail for the full-size version) for everyone to see (and...enjoy?)
P.S. - I finally got the background image uploaded to PB -- woohoo!
Best Wishes,
Allen
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Winner of the World's Worst Unintentional Site Makeover!
Yes, for a few days, IR Haven had "Image Not Available" wallpaper and numerous "Image Not Available" images, including the email link. Don't you love the cute little red stop sign X? It's so pretty...not!
No, IR Haven was NOT hacked.
I found out the hard way that Blog Explosion's image hosting has a 250 MB monthly bandwidth limit and that limit is very easy to reach. When that happens, your images no longer show; instead, you get the big red stop sign.
So I switched to Photo Bucket. They have a 10GB monthly limit on bandwidth.
By comparison, 250MB x 4 = 1 GB so Photo Bucket gives you 40 times as much bandwidth.
I will need to add the background image and some other images later today, but at least I was able to re-makeover the site in the meantime...lest some of you go blind (which would be really bad; I would feel awful)!
By the way, we're about 99% moved now.
Best Wishes,
Allen
Yes, for a few days, IR Haven had "Image Not Available" wallpaper and numerous "Image Not Available" images, including the email link. Don't you love the cute little red stop sign X? It's so pretty...not!
No, IR Haven was NOT hacked.
I found out the hard way that Blog Explosion's image hosting has a 250 MB monthly bandwidth limit and that limit is very easy to reach. When that happens, your images no longer show; instead, you get the big red stop sign.
So I switched to Photo Bucket. They have a 10GB monthly limit on bandwidth.
By comparison, 250MB x 4 = 1 GB so Photo Bucket gives you 40 times as much bandwidth.
I will need to add the background image and some other images later today, but at least I was able to re-makeover the site in the meantime...lest some of you go blind (which would be really bad; I would feel awful)!
By the way, we're about 99% moved now.
Best Wishes,
Allen
Saturday, July 15, 2006
When Exercise Attacks!
So I've been taking a new bus route to get to work since the move. On weekdays, I take 3 different buses to get to work (I used to take only one). Today was my first time taking a Saturday route to work -- and it only involved taking two buses...but there was a catch: I had thought the bus would take me closer to my job than it actually did.
So I found myself a couple of miles from my job instead of about half a mile like I'd planned.
In Texas heat.
Yay.
The only good part was that it was still early morning (around 9:15 am). I made good time, walking fast. I still was sweating pretty hard...but I made it in less than half an hour, so I was happy.
Next time, I'll pick a route that gets me a little closer. Really.
Best Wishes,
Allen
So I've been taking a new bus route to get to work since the move. On weekdays, I take 3 different buses to get to work (I used to take only one). Today was my first time taking a Saturday route to work -- and it only involved taking two buses...but there was a catch: I had thought the bus would take me closer to my job than it actually did.
So I found myself a couple of miles from my job instead of about half a mile like I'd planned.
In Texas heat.
Yay.
The only good part was that it was still early morning (around 9:15 am). I made good time, walking fast. I still was sweating pretty hard...but I made it in less than half an hour, so I was happy.
Next time, I'll pick a route that gets me a little closer. Really.
Best Wishes,
Allen
Thursday, July 06, 2006
One Drop (Rule) Is Wrong
The last time I blogged on this type of topic, I got a sharp criticism from an African-American reader who felt I wasn't qualified to speak on such things because I'm white. Nevermind how racist that in itself is, it is how some people feel. So let me preface this post by saying I am qualified to speak on the following topic because I am the father of two biracial children.
First, some historical background via Wikipedia:
So, keeping this in mind, it is troubling to me that One Drop Rule is even around... It's a way of thinking whose time has gone the way of the dodo and the dinosaur. It needs to die.
And this is my opinion only, but I believe One Drop Rule is racist. Yes, racist ... because it states that one racial heritage is dominant over the other even within a mixed-race genetic makeup. One Drop encourages a biracial or multiracial individual to choose one racial heritage over the other and downplay or deny the other -- supposedly for the good of the individual or to help them "fit in." As a social context, it is particularly insidious because often shame is used to batter the biracial individual into submission of the group- or collective-inspired racism. Mob rules thinking. It is wrong and should be called out for the terribly misguided racism it is. No one race or culture is any better than any other.
Fortunately, my sons have not faced this pressure yet. Austin is a fairly diverse city and interracial marriages and families are common here but there is racism, too -- from all sides. Someday, they may be encouraged to think that they're only Black. It may be from friends or coworkers or anybody, really.
My job as their parent is to teach them to embrace all of who they are. It's not about being white or black or even Apache. It's about being you, whatever that means. And my job (and my wife's) is to answer their questions about where they come from. If they want to know about African-American or even African culture, we will teach them. If they want to know about Native Americans, we will do the same. If they wanted to know about my Dutch ancestors, same thing.
Life is too short and confusing enough to be distracted by "racial identity issues." Simply be who you are -- ALL of who you are. My boys do not think of themselves as any one race -- they know they are mixed. But more important than that, they know they are loved.
That's really all that matters...isn't it?
Best Wishes,
Allen
The last time I blogged on this type of topic, I got a sharp criticism from an African-American reader who felt I wasn't qualified to speak on such things because I'm white. Nevermind how racist that in itself is, it is how some people feel. So let me preface this post by saying I am qualified to speak on the following topic because I am the father of two biracial children.
First, some historical background via Wikipedia:
The one-drop theory (or one-drop rule) is a historical colloquial term for the standard, found throughout the United States of America, that holds that a person with even a tiny portion of non-white ancestry ("one drop of non-white blood") should be classified as "colored", especially for the purposes of laws forbidding interracial marriage. It is an ethnocentric concept based on the idea of human hierarchy. This notion of invisible/intangible membership in a "racial" group has seldom been applied to people of Native American ancestry (see Race in the United States for details). The notion has also been applied to the idea of solely black ancestry.
By 1925, almost every state had a one-drop law on the books, or something equivalent. These were the laws that gave power to bureaucrats like Walter Plecker of Virginia [8], Naomi Drake of Louisiana [9], and similar people around the country — people whose mission was to hunt down any families of mixed ancestry and shove them to the Black side of the color line.
In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court, in its ruling on the case of Loving v. Virginia, conclusively invalidated Plecker's Virginia Racial Integrity Act, along with its key component, the one-drop rule, as unconstitutional. Despite this holding, the one-drop theory is still influential in U.S. society. Multiracial individuals with visible mixed European and African and/or Native American ancestry are often still considered non-white unless they explicitly declare themselves white or Anglo, and are typically identified instead as mixed-race, mulatto or mestizo, or Black or American Indian, for example. By contrast these standards are widely rejected by America's Latino community, the majority of whom are of mixed ancestry, but for whom their Latino cultural heritage is more important to their ethnic identities than "race". The one-drop rule is not generally applied to Latinos of mixed origin or to Arab-Americans.
So, keeping this in mind, it is troubling to me that One Drop Rule is even around... It's a way of thinking whose time has gone the way of the dodo and the dinosaur. It needs to die.
And this is my opinion only, but I believe One Drop Rule is racist. Yes, racist ... because it states that one racial heritage is dominant over the other even within a mixed-race genetic makeup. One Drop encourages a biracial or multiracial individual to choose one racial heritage over the other and downplay or deny the other -- supposedly for the good of the individual or to help them "fit in." As a social context, it is particularly insidious because often shame is used to batter the biracial individual into submission of the group- or collective-inspired racism. Mob rules thinking. It is wrong and should be called out for the terribly misguided racism it is. No one race or culture is any better than any other.
Fortunately, my sons have not faced this pressure yet. Austin is a fairly diverse city and interracial marriages and families are common here but there is racism, too -- from all sides. Someday, they may be encouraged to think that they're only Black. It may be from friends or coworkers or anybody, really.
My job as their parent is to teach them to embrace all of who they are. It's not about being white or black or even Apache. It's about being you, whatever that means. And my job (and my wife's) is to answer their questions about where they come from. If they want to know about African-American or even African culture, we will teach them. If they want to know about Native Americans, we will do the same. If they wanted to know about my Dutch ancestors, same thing.
Life is too short and confusing enough to be distracted by "racial identity issues." Simply be who you are -- ALL of who you are. My boys do not think of themselves as any one race -- they know they are mixed. But more important than that, they know they are loved.
That's really all that matters...isn't it?
Best Wishes,
Allen
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Look -- Up In The Sky! It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A -- Bunny??
Okay, sorry that it's off-topic but the 30-second bunny parody of the 1979 Superman movie is just amazingly accurate and funny! A must-see if you've ever seen the original...although I showed it to my kids and they got it, too. (I let my oldest son see the original Superman with me on cable tv last fall.) Family friendly and cute.
Happy July 4th in advance!
Best Wishes,
Allen
Okay, sorry that it's off-topic but the 30-second bunny parody of the 1979 Superman movie is just amazingly accurate and funny! A must-see if you've ever seen the original...although I showed it to my kids and they got it, too. (I let my oldest son see the original Superman with me on cable tv last fall.) Family friendly and cute.
Happy July 4th in advance!
Best Wishes,
Allen
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
An IR True Story
My wife was out and about Christmas shopping yesterday with my oldest son, Adam. They were in line at a Hobby Lobby store waiting to pay for their items and my wife shows Adam a $100 bill. He looks at it and says "Wow! That's Ben Franklin!" My wife says "Yes, that's right. Did you know that Ben Franklin is one of your ancestors, on your father's side?" He responded "Wow! Does that mean we're important people??" To which my wife said "Honey, Ben Franklin is a lot of people's ancestor."
There was one more thing that made the whole thing all the more funny, though. Out of the corner of her eye, my wife saw an older gentleman in line behind them (who happened to be white) -- and he was looking at them very strangely after my (black) wife told my (biracial) son that he was related to Ben Franklin.
They say for everything else, there's Mastercard...but this was priceless!
Best Wishes,
Allen
My wife was out and about Christmas shopping yesterday with my oldest son, Adam. They were in line at a Hobby Lobby store waiting to pay for their items and my wife shows Adam a $100 bill. He looks at it and says "Wow! That's Ben Franklin!" My wife says "Yes, that's right. Did you know that Ben Franklin is one of your ancestors, on your father's side?" He responded "Wow! Does that mean we're important people??" To which my wife said "Honey, Ben Franklin is a lot of people's ancestor."
There was one more thing that made the whole thing all the more funny, though. Out of the corner of her eye, my wife saw an older gentleman in line behind them (who happened to be white) -- and he was looking at them very strangely after my (black) wife told my (biracial) son that he was related to Ben Franklin.
They say for everything else, there's Mastercard...but this was priceless!
Best Wishes,
Allen
Friday, October 15, 2004
Same Blog, New Slogan
Yep, I finally decided to get rid of "It's not just a website, it's a Community!" for, well, obvious reasons: converting from a website with a forum to a blog with comments changes the nature of things. It allows me to say a whole lot more and share personal pictures and events in my life but there's just not as much conversation as there used to be in the old forum days. A forum was just too crazy to run, though -- too many people with axes to grind, usually on my head...and I just didn't need the headache. So when the free service I was using suddenly became not-so-free, about two years ago, it was just a matter of practicality to ditch the forum. When I started the blog last year, the slogan still was cool, so I kept it around.
But if I've noticed anything about the internet, it's that you have to reinvent yourself now and then to keep people interested in what you're doing. Not that I'm making Madonna-like claims (Madonna, like it or not, is the "Queen of Reinvention"), but I love this site and I want it to be all it can be for you. And now that we've hooked up with Blog Explosion, there's a potential for a whole new audience for IR Haven.
So, I thought to myself, "What really defines what IR Haven is all about now -- and then what's a cool hook I can add at the end?" The end result: "Interracial Marriage. Biracial Kids. Blogging the Paradise!"
Let me know what you think! Leave me a comment below.
Best Wishes,
Allen
Yep, I finally decided to get rid of "It's not just a website, it's a Community!" for, well, obvious reasons: converting from a website with a forum to a blog with comments changes the nature of things. It allows me to say a whole lot more and share personal pictures and events in my life but there's just not as much conversation as there used to be in the old forum days. A forum was just too crazy to run, though -- too many people with axes to grind, usually on my head...and I just didn't need the headache. So when the free service I was using suddenly became not-so-free, about two years ago, it was just a matter of practicality to ditch the forum. When I started the blog last year, the slogan still was cool, so I kept it around.
But if I've noticed anything about the internet, it's that you have to reinvent yourself now and then to keep people interested in what you're doing. Not that I'm making Madonna-like claims (Madonna, like it or not, is the "Queen of Reinvention"), but I love this site and I want it to be all it can be for you. And now that we've hooked up with Blog Explosion, there's a potential for a whole new audience for IR Haven.
So, I thought to myself, "What really defines what IR Haven is all about now -- and then what's a cool hook I can add at the end?" The end result: "Interracial Marriage. Biracial Kids. Blogging the Paradise!"
Let me know what you think! Leave me a comment below.
Best Wishes,
Allen
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