2009-04-26 First Baptist sermon: So Who Are We?

Sowhoarewe by Johnson, Darrell  
Download now or listen on posterous

SoWhoAreWe.mp3 (7187 KB)

Testing continues... seeing how these audio thingies work and look on Posterous.
This one also happens to be one of the best sermons ever. imho.
Speaker is Darrell Johnson, the next Senior Minister at First Baptist in Vancouver.

Would this be a good way for First Baptist Church sermons to be posted online?
Please comment!...

Posted via email from Lam's posterous

This was how our Christmas was.

It was nice to set a tone of togetherness & lots of Harrison family love.

Thanks to everyone who wished and is wishing us well.

No date set yet... we'll let you know!

See that website? I wrote that!

I almost forgot about this. I wrote copy for this website: www.ETTechnologiesInc.com

Worked with a good group of dudes on it. Good one, guys! Nice to see it up & running!

Drew Marshall on 100 Huntley Street

The YouTube clip is something Rev. Bob Swann showed Heather at work yesterday.I didn't get a chance to sit with them and watch all of it, but I did this morning.  If Bob blogged I'm sure he'd post this. There are days (probably most of them) when I believe more of us as Christians should be like this (the guy on the right). I'm gonna have to check out his show some time... Part 2 should pop up if you play through. Can somebody tell me if it doesn't? Please?

Maybe I can Design and/or Art Direct...

I did an ad for the WestEnder. For those of you in town, it'll be in this Thursday's issue. It's also on our church homepage. I hope it turns out okay, apparently there were some little technical glitches.

It's amazing with the creative process... especially my own personal creative process... and especially my own personal creative process as pertains to design... I feel like I can be very hit-and-miss, then some days it really works, and it really works more quickly than I think it would, and I tell myself "...that came out of me?!". Not that this was an epiphany of that calibre (ironically, I don't know if I sense a strong copywriter presence here), but it felt like a nice little ad. I have to tip a very large hat to bittbox.

Since doing this, I got compliments on the design from two people who do this sort of thing for a living, one being David Yu, my old AD partner at Harfield (and he'd tell me straight up if it wasn't so...). Ta, I blush... (I don't even know exactly what "ta" means but somebody semi-famous wrote in it an email to me once and it was just so British-ish cute!)

This is me at the 6th Canadian National Scrabble Championships!

Thanks to Ann Chow for the photo. Maybe I should have taken a picture... but I was a bit busy! Playing the 1995 Scrabble® World Champion, David Boys!

One of the reasons we write blogs, or write period, is so we don't have to repeat ourselves. I've already recounted my Scrabble Nationals experience to a few people so I have the benefit of some rehearsal. I'm also pretty sure I'll still be telling this story to someone in the not-too-distant future.

In short, this was probably the most up-and-down tournament in my life. Get this: Won my first 4 in a row, then lost 5 in a row, won 1, lost 5, won the last 3. Such a streak-fest, it was bizarre. Because you move up the tables as you do better, I think I may have had some of the biggest range in going up and down the "ladder" of this tournament. The neatest coincidence: Ann Chow came to see the tournament with her friend Peter, who since he's a club member and they needed someone, was asked to annotate a game... which happened to be MY game, against David Boys! They left after that game. So they were there for the high point of my tournament. With Peter right beside me, watching me make some really questionable plays.

Speaking of which, two most painful "misses" that cost me games:

1. Missing SMARTEN (but seeing MARTENS and SARMENT) against Zev Kaufman. A pretty tough player, also really nice, he commiserated with my bingo miss and said "you always miss the obvious ones...". And he knows his stuff, and when he asks you about good plays, he asks for them as Alphagrams (letters in alphabetical order) so he can try to work them out.

2. Saw EROTICAL but it didn't make sense to me as a word, and I thought I'd seen it in wordlists as EROTICA having no back hooks. Would have been a 90-pt Double Double.

So I'm kicking myself. Sometimes I wonder if I should be kicking myself more: good players (in anything) sometimes take losing pretty hard but it's what makes them winners. Then again, something in me tries really hard to be a jerk about stuff, especially stuff like this, I mean c'mon, it's a board game.

Anyway, I looked back at my stats today and realized many of the most memorable games were the last of the streaks:

1. In the last game of the 4 game win streak, against Sue Tremblay, I played a Triple-Triple, GALATEAS for 140 pts. I triple-tripled at the Canadian Nationals! (I might actually have weird stats for triple-triples: I had 3 games with Triple-Triples in them in the 30 games of the 2004 US Nationals, 2 by me and 1 against me; that seemed weird enough, but then I had 2 triple-triple games AGAIN in the 2007 Vancouver Tournament over 14 games, and SHOULD have had one played against me by Mike Baker, who missed ORGANICS; weird thing again, the only other time I'd played Mike up to that point, he'd triple-tripled against me through a Y... "I thought who's going to triple-triple with a Y as the second letter?", and he slaps down MYCELIAN... in Vancouver I thought the same thing: "G as the third letter?"...).

2. Last game of the 5 game win streak was a loss to Tony Leah, 470-462. The score almost says it all, but I gave him a real scare when I played WATAP with W on the triple letter, hooking T onto ENURE and hitting the double word for 42 points. I actually thought I'd won but he had the good stuff to go out and squeak out the win. Oddly enough, Marilyn Murray from our club played Adam Logan (the reigning Champ who just repeated this year) beside me and lost by 2.

3. Can I call it a streak? The one game between the 10 losses was against Geoffrey Newman, a young guy who won a junior spot in this Nationals by winning it in the Early Bird Tournament on the Friday. A neat start: he bingos with aBSOLVe to start. I play JERK, hooking R to form ABSOLVER which now can take an S at the Triple Word spot. Geoffrey plays AGO (and KA) to block the obvious big play, but then I play just the S for ABSOLVERS and SAGO for 51 points. So with 2 turns and 5 tiles I'd pretty much caught up to an opening bingo. Then I just drew the bag after that, and Geoffrey drew crap.

4. Last game of 5-game losing streak II was against Sary Karanofsy from Montreal. She bingoed 5 times, I bingoed once, and still I only lost by 51.

5. Actually, I lied... last game of the tournament was pretty straightforward. However, the first win of the 3 was a really tight board and my tracking came into play in "willing" a win against Joan Buma (she really wanted it too): I made just the right plays to score and also stop her from going out with the letters she had. That was right after the 5-bingoer, so I was pretty spent after that and was probably at risk of a heart attack.

So overall, the tournament was a great learning experience. I think I'll study next time. And maybe not take the red-eye flight over.

I'm so grateful to everyone who's been supportive of my Scrabble exploits and bringing it to this stage of making the cut for the Canadian Nationals. When I got back to the office, the group had pitched in the get me the standard Scrabble mug. It's big! That was so wonderful of them to do that. They also did a crossword card thing-y with their names criss-crossed and saying Welcome Back. As a group, they were genuinely interested and tracked along with the CNSC website. Sometimes that group of women is quite awesome...

Oh yeah, it was also great to have the Nationals in Toronto and to be able to spend time with the family. Here's a picture of my nephew Griffin. Ain't he a little charmer?!

It was also cool on Tuesday night to hang out with Jonathan, Ann (Happy Birthday again!) and my brother Hin at Dangerous Dan's, a hardcore meat place. Pictured here is the dessert I got with my meal, a fried Mars bar (yes, there was one in there. We think).

Retroblog 1: The best of Hallowe'ens, the worst of Hallowe'ens...
Thanks to my buds who've responded to my first blog entry in over 6 years. What a moment in blog history. My brother's comment: "Will we have to wait another 6 years for another blog entry?" I guess this entry means no. Or at least, no for now...

It's probably a little retro even for this year's considerations, but seemed appropriate as we all get over our Hallowe'en hangovers to write a bit about my best & worst childhood Hallowe'en memories.

Worst first: I was going to go out for Hallowe'en one year, I think I was 8, and the friend I was going with stood me up. So I stayed home. Looking back it seems like one of the saddest things ever. Honestly, the injustice of it bothers me more now than it did then. I was bummed, but not too bummed that night. Incidentally, the guy who stood me up failed Grade 3.

My favourite Hallowe'en memory was trick or treating when we lived in an apartment in Scarborough (E end of Toronto). Probably the one time I remember when we could trick or treat indoors (besides the parties that are now becoming the thing), and I have this image of a mass of 30-40 kids running with as much speed as was possible in an apartment hallway with such a big group, going from door-to-door in the apartment, led by a kid who looked like a giant to me at the time (I was 5 I think) who was dressed up as Santa, still one of the all-time best costume ideas. I think because of their speed and my weeness, the group left us behind before long, and my brother Hin & I were on our own for a little while. This one guy's door we knocked on, he was barely aware that it was Hallowe'en but invited us in for a couple of chocolate chip cookies. We were so young & naive and that was so dangerous, but we're still alive. Anyway, my memories of that year are fond. At least for a moment, there was a feeling like we were part of a group, like the kids in Fat Albert. The fondness might also be because I've remembered it wrong. Hin, do you concur? And was this the year you won best costume in your class because Mom stuck you in a painted cardboard box with a C3PO mask?

I've been blogging for over 6 years. Technically.
I doubt anyone really noticed. It had one entry. I had meant to keep it up, and it's taken me till now to get my ass in gear and add the second. Six years between entries. If anyone was waiting for an update, I am so so very sorry.

Where do I start updating? The biggies:

• I've been able to keep a big R Relationship going since July 06. It's an amazing thing to share my life with Dana, the kind of woman I didn't think I'd find in our church, but did. God provides.
• I work at my home church now, First Baptist. The website is something I'm somewhat responsible for, so if you have any input, bring it on... I'm also a leader in the Internationals program there (First Baptist Internationals, or FBI).
• I don't think I was as much a Scrabble® geek when this blog went up as I am now. I'm now a director of the Vancouver Scrabble Club and I play in Expert Divisions when they let me. Next scheduled tournament is our 2nd annual Vancouver-Seattle Challenge on Nov 17, where we Vancouverites hope to win back the trophy that our Club member Erika Werdal made. Go us!
• In case it's not self-evident, I live in Vancouver now.
  

So that's the rundown, 6 years of my life summarized (rather deficiently I'm sure) in about 3-4 bullets. I intend to get in here more regularly and give a better day-to-day rundown of events and thoughts. Considering the 6 year hiatus, though, I'll likely also retro-blog some thoughts from time passed as well. Till then, though, I figured it was high time I put something up here. So here it is. Woo-hoo.

Ya had ta ask...

This site was created to answer all those people who keep asking "How are you doing?". All three of you.

In the next little while, I'm going to work out what I'm going to say, and whether I'm going to keep this site or post to my other one. Oh, the free site resources a bugger can find...

Oh, by the way, I'm fine.