After nearly ten months of growing out all hair above my shoulders, the waining hours of Mother’s Day 2011 saw a freshly oiled set of clippers take my months of commitment and throw it in the bathroom sink.
Fellas, I’m sorry. Ladies, you’re welcome.
In 1863 Charitie de Cheney Lees Smith Bancroft penned the lyrics above in her hymn, “Before the Throne of God Above”. As I was meditating (on both the date and the matter) Good Friday, this song — and specifically this verse — kept coming to mind.
I’m so thankful for songs that put the message of the Gospel to melodies that get stuck in my head. Much more thankful am I for the Gospel itself: that He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.
Happy Easter.
Yesterday a good friend of mine, Jimmy Needham, came to Pullman with his band on their tour. It had been years since we’d had a chance to actually hang out, so was a pleasure catching up with him and his insanely talented bandmates throughout the day. We spent a considerable amount of time in The Bell Tower’s green room which — fortunately for me — housed an upright piano on which Chris Keyes and Jimmy rehearsed a beautiful rendition of Hurricane before the show.
And then came the public show. If you aren’t already familiar with Jimmy’s music, you ought to be. Do yourself a favor and check him out. In doing so you’ll be feeding his wife and baby girl. Do it.
In case you missed the big announcement yesterday, I launched a brand new portfolio for my photography. I thought I’d give a little tutorial on how to navigate it, in case you (a) get lost trying to find the site, or (b) get lost on the site.
[Note: the rearranging necessary to launch the portfolio broke existing odfm subscriptions. Lame on my part, I know. Resubscribe, please?!?]
Getting to the site
There are a few ways to get to the site. You could…
Image 1:
Getting around the site
Once you’ve made it to the site, you have several options when it comes to navigating your way around. Such as…
You’re doing a great job. Now for a bonus feature: thumbnails! To see little baby versions of each photo within an album, just click this little guy below the big boy photo: 
. Then, click the baby picture to see it grow up real big. (It’s like magic.)
I hope you have a nice time on the site. And if you get lost… well at least you’ll be boosting my Google Analytics numbers.
In closing, I’d like to send a large measure of thanks to the folks at Whiteloupe, whose customer service and template are both absolutely top-notch. I can’t speak highly enough of them. I’m not going to write a tutorial on how to navigate their site, but I will recommend checking them out.
Some of the details of this story are more important than the “why” of my watching and enjoying ABC’s The Bachelor, so don’t worry about that part. Just know that if my schedule, my access to a television set or an Internet connection, and the right viewing partners align perfectly, I’ll be as committed to watching that show as a sports fanatic is to watching Superbowl.
For those who didn’t catch this past season of The Bachelor, there was a contestant who made it to the final four before getting the boot. We knew her as the funeral director/embalmer, and if we were really paying attention (perhaps maybe because we’d formed a small crush), we knew her as “Shawntel N.”
By the end of the season, I’d decided that if I had to pick one of the girls, it’d be Shawntel N. After the season finale, I half-jokingly posted a facebook status stating my intent to woo and marry Shawntel N., and I asked my friends what they thought the best means of going about that were. Not much fruit came from that, until March 25th, when my friend sent me the following on twitter:
Apparently Shawntel N. had joined twitter, which isn’t altogether surprising considering twitter’s popularity. I responded:
I sent that tweet fully expecting that to be the end of it. Normal-girl-turned-reality-show-celebrity would certainly have better things to do than desire friendship with the author of an award-winning blog. Then, less than an hour later, I saw this pop up in my feed:
No lie, I was pretty excited to see that, but I kept my cool. I took a little while to think through what the best possible response was. I took a chance and sent her this:
And that was the last I heard from Shawntel N. for a while. I did the whole thing “maybe she hasn’t checked her twitter yet”, but her tweets spoke to the contrary. I clung to hope for a few days, but after about day four, I’d let go. It seemed that the best I could come up with in the way of a reply wasn’t good enough. Shawntel N. had no doubt forgotten about me — if she’d even remembered me in the first place.
Then, two days ago, this happened:
I fully expected this to be a (pretty good) prank from a friend with a California number. I tried to think of ways I could turn the joke on the person who picked up the line when I called, and I thought it’d be funny to blow my top and scream at them, making them feel really bad for playing games with my heart that way. But when I called later that day, the voice on the other line sounded remarkably like Shawntel N. from The Bachelor. A couple back-and-forth’s into the conversation I was convinced: this actually was her.
Unbelievable! I mean, seriously, this stuff does NOT happen to me.
So it turns out that she has a younger cousin who is considering attending University of Idaho, and she and her cousin are going to be in town for “Vandal Friday”, an event for prospective students. Apparently a ton of people come in town for this event too, because the hotels are all booked, which is why she contacted me. She saw on twitter/facebook that I live in Moscow, and she was wondering if she and her cousin could crash with me.
I told her that they were more than welcome to stay in our guest room, and in a moment of great charm and boldness, I asked her if she’d let me take her out to dinner while she was in town… and she said that’d be nice.
This was just too good to be true. I was, and am, beside myself.
They’ll be getting here in the next few hours, and I feel like the dorky junior high kid who got asked to dance by the most popular girl at school.
I mean, I’m even blogging about it, and I NEVER blog about girls. It’s just too risky. What if I write a lot of blog posts about a girl, then I end up marrying a different girl? I don’t see that going well for me in the long run, so I don’t do it. But since it’s April Fool’s Day, I thought I’d take the risk implicit in blogging about girls to let the masses know that I’m taking Shawntel Newton out on a date tonight.
Be jealous.