Pleasant Surprises

Enjoy the little things.

And cardio. Don't forget cardio.

We hear that all the time, and experience it all the time, but rarely recognize the joy that daily life brings us. I was reading a post on Marc and Angel Hack Life entitled "101 Short Stories that Will Leave You Smiling, Crying and Thinking". Story #21 goes like this:

"Today, while I was driving my grandfather to his doctor’s appointment, I complained about hitting 2 red lights in a row.  My grandfather chuckled and said, 'You always complain about the red lights, but you never celebrate the green ones.'"  

[Working Title]

Zdravstvuyte! (Hello in Russian!)

I just got bored saying "hi!" to an audience that doesn't audibly hear me, so I wanted to mix it up. Anyway, I've been working for a few weeks on a song! As I've been doing more and more research on worship music, what it means, and its significance, I've found that writing worship songs can (and sometimes should) be a significant part of a worship leader's responsibility. This is important because as a leader, you are serving those specific people whom you are leading, and so in my situation as a college student with the privilege of leading other college students in worship, I have a different perspective from people Chris Tomlin or Joel Houston. I absolutely love singing the songs that they've written, and there is so much Truth out there in the contemporary Christian music scene, and its cool to have the opportunity to contribute a little bit to that. And sure I might not be as talented as them and I'm fine with that. But heck, I won't know until I try, right? I've decided to share with the blogosphere some of the lyrics I've written, and I would love to hear back from people and get your thoughts/opinions! Also, please don't like steal them and claim them as your own or anything. That would be really lame.

What My Finals Look Like

So for the past couple weeks, I've been working hard in the studio to finish our final project in Arch 271. The program we were given for this project was that the building sat on a site that is 40'x20' (aka really small), and there had to be a 3' area of space between the building and the site border. This means that our actual building could only be 34'x14'x20' (meaning even smaller). From here, we had to design a building that consisted of 7 spaces, using around 1000 sq. ft. To give you a sense of scale, my dorm room is around 200 sq. ft. The 7 spaces were defined as:
A- Small enclosed space upon which you enter the construction
B- A large linear room directly related to A
C- A secondary space proportionally related, yet smaller than B
D--F- Tertiary spaces, smaller than C
G- An outdoor space

So that's what I was given to do, and here's a little taste of how I did it.