Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

God's blessings ebb and flow like the tide. I'm taking stock of things that bring me joy in this season of my life. Living 2 minutes from work Shane's cute voice and speech impediments Being able to pick up both my boys with one arm and my wife with the other A stable job without crazy overtime demands The best church I've ever seen A stable economy Wrestling with the kids Being able to kiss my boys without their embarrassment The ability to tumble down stairs painlessly Looking young enough to blend in with the crowd at metal shows And here's a list of things I won't miss. (Assuming they change for the better.) Computer technology not being powerful enough to convey my creativity Living in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 adults and 2 kids A small, modest house in my area selling for 3 -4 hundred thousand dollars Our stupid hamster that just pees on you whenever you pick

It looked like I wasn't going to. My company has grown a bit since I started 2 ½ years ago. I was hire #33. Now we are around 120. Last year they sent everyone who wanted to go. This year it's just not feasible, so they are only sending team leads. I was sad. Besides being my best source of news for my industry, E3 is like a class reunion for me and my friends from my previous job in Michigan . The Outrage crew. We were like a family. I worked there for 5 years and most of us were relatively new to the industry. We went through some really, really stressful times together such as a 6 month crunch at the end of Descent 3 and an on-again-off-again relationship with a desperately flaky publisher. (Interplay) So have a really strong bond and still keep in contact to this day. My point is that keeping in touch with them is really important to me so I was very disappointed to hear I wasn't a golden-child picked to go to E3 this year. I half-jokingly

Remember that time... what was it... like in the early '90s at some point... When the Amish almost took over the U.S. and Canada ? They joined with the Mennonites and declared that they seceded from the union. At first we were all like, "Whatever". But then we found out they had a nuclear program. Detroit was the first city hit, and by the time the military was mobilized, New York City and Philadelphia had been laid to waste. Once we stormed their "nation" we found that they had been busy over the last 200 years digging secret passages to every major city in the U.S. and Canada . They were all gone except for one suicide bomber at the entrance to their tunnel system. He blew himself up, (along with most of the second battalion) and collapsed the tunnel making it impossible to track where the Mennonite/Amish Coalition forces had gone. I remember how the nation was on pins and needles during the mid nineties because we all knew that the M.A.C. forces h