The Head of the Charles is this Saturday! The Lightweight Has-Beens will row again! Check out the promo page for details.

I saw Pat Green tonight! This was totally unexpected. Pat Green is an awesome country music singer from Texas. He's been big in the Texas circuit for a while, but has only received national recognition recently. A few weeks ago I was shocked to hear a Pat Green song on the radio. I didn't think anyone up here had ever heard of him.

Monday of this week I was even more surprised when my friend Allison from my small group told me that he was playing in Boston -- at the Paradise of all places. We tried to order tickets on Tuesday, but they were sold out. I had resigned myself to this harsh reality but then I heard that my friend Matt was going to go and try and get tickets from scalpers. Allison and I decided to join him. Well it took about an hour or so of standing out in the cold asking people if they had extra tickets, but we finally got the hook up! One guy just straight up handed me his ticket and refused to take any money for it.

The concert was awesome! Pat Green and his band put on a great performance. Plus this was the largest collection of cowboy hats I've ever seen in Boston. This place was filled with Texans (but there was no Shiner Bock). Anyway this is a lesson to me that I need to pay closer attention to the bands that are coming to town.

Tonight was the first River Late Nite. This is something new were trying to do at the River (the college community of my church, The Cambridge Vineyard. Our idea was to have a coffee-house-type event with live music and exotic selection of coffee beverages. Our aim was to create a cool, relaxed environment where Christians and non-Christians could have real conversations about real topics. We think it went pretty well and it was definitely a good time.

We looked at a few movie clips from Braveheart, Notting Hill and The Shawshank Redemption. Braveheart gave us a good question to center our conversation on. William Wallace says: "Every man dies, but not every man truly lives." So the obvious question from this is "what does it mean to truly live?"

If you ever need an excuse to take Friday off from work and have a three-day weekend, then I recommend running in the Reach the Beach Relay. This is what me and 10 of my friends (some new, some old) this weekend. This is a 200 mile relay race for crazy people that takes place in New Hampshire.

We started at 10:00 AM on Friday morning in Bretton Woods, NH and finished at 3:09 PM on Saturday. We had someone running continuously all day and all night. Our total time was 29:09:30 for an average pace of 8:26 per mile. We finished 37th out of 80 teams in our event (mixed open).

The course was divided into 36 legs and we covered the legs by cycling through a rotation. So most of us had three legs while a few people had four legs. I had three legs that were 7 mi., 6 mi., and 5 mi. long. We had two vans that we used to coordinate the transportation of our runners. The chase van would drop off a runner at his station, pick up the person who just handed off to him, and then drive to the next station and repeat. You'd think you'd have plenty of time in between your runs because there's 10 other people running before you have to run again. But it's amazing how fast the time goes by. With all the logistics of transportation and what not, you barely have time to rehydrate, grab a short nap, change clothes (or not in my case!) and choke down a choke down a power bar before your next leg. Plus, there's the formidable task of trying to find a bathroom you can use. A lot of the transition stations had like one porta-potty for 100 runners to share -- big F-.

This race was so AWESOME! I've never had so much fun running! I totally want to do it again next year.

(OK, first I have to apologize to you, my loyal fans, for the long period of silence that has prevailed since my last update. The rest of the summer was a blur or craziness! I'll try and add some snippets of the excitement (most notably, my trip to Brazil!), but for the most part, I'm trying to live in the present. I was without internet for a while, but I'm back in business, baby!)

Today's the day I died my hair red. I died it red because I wanted to see what I would look like with red hair (because I couldn't remember). How'd it turn out you ask? You tell me!

Today, I went sculling for the first time since September. My friend Stephen was in town from NYC and we took out a double. We loli-gaged up the course for a while and then decided to do a reverse Head of the Charles course (3 miles) for time on the way back. We finished with about a 21:30 give or take a few seconds for steering and traffic. We were reasonably pleased with this since we were only rowing at a rating of about 22 strokes per minute. We didn't flip and we didn't hit anything. Go us!

After rowing, we enjoyed some breakfast at IHOP and then saw Dumb and Dumberer.

A group of us guys from church got together at Gabrien's tonight to play some Risk. But this wasn't you father's risk, this was New RISK 2210 A.D. which has several added layers of complexity relative to Classic Risk. For instance, there's water territories and you can colonize the moon. Perhaps most notably is the fact that the game is limited to five rounds -- the winner is the one with the highest point total at the end.

So you'd think that if each person can only take five turns that the game would go by rather quickly. Well, our game took a mere Seven HOURS! I didn't get home untill 3:00 AM (gasp!)!

The contestants were Alex T. Macmillan, Gabrien Symons, John Robinson, Tim Jones, Andrew Weigel, Kerwin and myself.

We originally started playing two concurrent games. In Game 1, there was myself, Tim, Alex T. Macmillan, and Andrew. Game 2 was Gabrien, John, and Kerwin Tang. Game 2 finished in a reasonable three hours with Gabrien emerging as the futuristic global dictator. Then Tim and Kerwin had to leave so Gabrien and John teamed up to take over Tim's spot -- a dangerous combination!

While I did employ the fool-proof strategy of controlling Austrailia (and all of Asia!), I still managed to muck things up after the first few rounds. Andrew had managed to amass formidable armies and had slowly extended his empire over a few continents. As we went into the last round, it seemed to be pretty clear that Andrew was going to win. But we learned not to underestimate the abilities of the clever and determined (not to mention scheming and conniving) Alex T. Macmillan who went from last place to first place in the very last turn of the game! He schooled us all -- except for Andrew who we also calculated to be a winner through a different (and more correct) way of adding up the points.

You may be wondering about the massive stockpile of resources required to fuel such a marathon session of global conquest. In our case, the toil of war required the following rations:

• 4 large pizzas
• lots of soda
• 2 boxes of cookies
• 1 very big bowl of popcorn
• 3 rounds of margaritas
• 1 box of Swiss Cake Rolls

Janelle, Chad, and I went to Coolidge Corner for dinner tonight. We walked around looking for a place to eat, but by the time we decided where to eat, Chad had to leave to catch a movie. Janelle and I ended up eating at the Coolidge Corner Clubhouse, which I've walked by a million times but never eaten at before. It's a pretty cool place. All the items on their menu are named after athletes, but I couldn't find my name anywhere on the menu... go figure. We ordered burgers for take out and then ate them at a nearby playground. Then we browsed in the Booksmith bookstore for a while and then went to J.P. Licks.

Afterwards, Janelle convinced me, in spite of my squeamishness, to help her clean the cut on her hand she had gotten earlier in the day. It was a pretty bad cut and there was lots of dirt and gravel still in it so I tried to clean it out with some Hydrogen Peroxide and a needle. I did my best, but I don't know if I'll be getting my wound care merit badge anytime soon.

Today after church, we had a meeting for our upcoming mission trip to Brazil (read more about the trip here). We mostly discussed fundraising since we still need to raise more than $20,000. After the meeting, we went to the Midwest Grill in Cambridge for some Brazilian cuisine.

Most of us got the Brazilian BBQ Buffet. This means that waitors come to your table about every two minutes with a big roasting spit of meat and carve you off as much as you like. They rotate through beef, pork, chicken, lamb, sausage, and every kind of meat you can think of. They rolled their eyes a little when I asked for some A-1, but overall the service was good and friendly. I'm definitely looking forward to meals on our trip!

My friend Janelle a nd I went to Rhode Island (my second favorite state after Texas) to go line dancing. We went to a place called Mardi Gras in Cranston, RI. It was tons of fun!

We showed up at 7:00 because we heard there was going to be line dancing lessons. When we showed up, there was lot's of "old people" waiting outside the door for things to open. They were all quite clearly dressed up to go line dancing. We felt a little young for this crowd since the youngest people there besides us had at least a decade on us. When we went inside and when the lesson's started, all these people immediately started doing some complicated line dance perfectly in rhythm. Then we found out that they were having lesson's but the lesson's were advanced lesson's for experienced people. Supposedly, lesson's for beginners are on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Since the lesson's turned out to be completely useless, we decided to go and eat dinner and then come back later when there might actually be people our age at the club. But we found out that we had to wait until after 8:00 to leave if we didn't want to have to pay the cover again. So to kill time we went up to the second floor. Mardi Gras has three different dance areas. There's the country-western part (called Diamond Rodeo) where the line dancing was happening, and 80's/90's room and a techno/hip-hop room. The second floor is the techno/hip-hop room and it was completely empty except for the staff. So Janelle taught me one of the simple line dances up there and we danced around by ourselves for a while.

When it was finally 8:00, we left and went to eat at the foodcourt of a nearby mall. We ate at a place called Walt's Roast Beef. It was decent, but it didn't compare to the late Buzzy's Fabulous Roast Beef (moment of silence) or even Arby's for that matter. On the bright side, they did have delicious Del's Lemonade which I hadn't had in a long time.

The Mardi Gras was definitely much more lively by the time we got back. There was lots more people, many of them our age. It turns out that line dancing is a fairly involved form of dancing. I always thought that there was one basic sequence of steps and everything else was some variation of that set of movements. WRONG! There's like a billion different completely distinct line dances. The thing about line dancing is that you can't just do whatever line dance you know because if everyone's not doing the same steps then you'll have complete chaos on the dance floor with people running into each other with lots mamings and fatalities and such. I never figured out how all these people know which line dance they're going to do for a certain song, but they all seemed to know right of the bat.

Unfortunately, they only played one song for the line dance that Janelle had just taught me. So the rest of the time, we just got out there and tried to follow what everyone else is doing. It felt sort of like some cheesy movie where high school guys are dressed up as cheerleaders trying to match the moves of real cheerleaders. And while my bodily coordination is worthy of any chess club, this was challenging even for me. Many people were laughing at us and thought we were very drunk.

Later on, we also tried some two-stepping and some other random dances. We didn't really fare much better at these. On five or six different occaisions, we had different people come up to us and say things like "uhh... you guys know about the lessons for beginners right?" A number of people also tried to give us pointers which was very nice and even a little bit helpful.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Hooray for Sunday! Went to church as usual. Our pastor, Dave Schmelzer gave an excellent sermon on enjoying prayer. If you're interested in hearing it, it's available in streaming format on the Vineyard website here.

After church, a bunch of us drove out to the Fruitlands Museum for David and May's wedding. David Buchs and May Lee (see picture) are two of my friends from The River, both on the worship team. They had a very nice wedding despite the rain. They really know how to throw a party! I didn't get home until after midnight. They had an open bar the whole time which I thought was impressive. The bride and groom came into the reception area dancing to Jungle Boogie -- that's hard to top if you ask me.

Today was the day of the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship. I decided to enter at the last minute. It's basically a two and a half hour written test where you try to solve different types of puzzles. These puzzles were ridiculously difficult! There were 23 puzzles to be solved in two and a half hours -- I only answered five! and I'm pretty sure one was wrong. Anyway, if you're feeling mentally spry, you can take a look at the test/solutions for yourself.

Later on, I got together with some friends from church and we went out to eat at Bertucci's. Then we had J.P. Licks for dessert. I ordered chocolate brownie ice cream with chocolate chips and chocolate syrup. mmm.... chocolate!

OK, triathalon swimming class, take 2. I showed up at 6:15 in the morning this time. I introduced myself to the instructor and he asked me what my swimming background was. "I don't have one," I said. Then he explained that the class was really meant for people who are already comfortable swimming triathalon distances at race speeds who just want to train and get faster. So he said the class was probably not for me but I was welcome to stick around for today's class. It was very quickly apparent that I was way out of my league. It turns out all the people in the class were already triathaletes. So I decided to get out of their way and just move over to the rec lanes and swim laps on my own.

After I had been swimming for a while, a life gaurd name Angelie came up to me in between laps and said, "Uhh, you should try putting your head underwater. You can go a lot faster with a lot less effort." I explained that I found it hard to breathe with my head underwater only coming up for air everyother stroke. So she very kindly gave me some tips and some much needed coaching.

Afterwards, I went to the front desk and switched myself out of the triathalon class into "Pre-masters Swim Class I." Hopefully that willl teach me how to swim.

So today was supposed to be the First Day of my Triathalon swimming class. I decided it would be really cool to do triathalons, but I don't know anything about swimming long distances at fast speeds. A triathalon swimming class seemed like the perfect solution. Only problem is that the class meets at 6:15 AM and not 6:15 PM like I thought. So I missed the first class -- Doh!

Yay Memorial Day. I slept in -- what a concept. When I woke up, I started reading a new book called Every Man's Battle. Then Chad and I got together to watch some episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Chad is a Buffy enthusiast and he had been trying to get me to watch it since I had never seen it before. He has the first three seasons on DVD. So we watched the first three episodes. I thought it was a pretty decent show, but I'll have to see some more before I really form an opinion.

Then we went to lifegroup. My housemate John went with us. John has been going to church at the Vineyard for a while and he was interested in finding a small group, so I invited him to come check out ours. We met for a while and then decided to rent and watch As Good as it Gets. I think it's a super-excellent movie even though it adds to my confusion about love and relationships. Anyway, it's a pretty long movie and it was after midnight (zounds!) when I finally got home.

I didn't mind so much that it was getting so late because I was planning on working out in the evening the following day. Tuesday was supposed to be the first day of my Triathalon swimming class which I had been looking forward to.

I went to see Switchfoot at the House of Blues in Harvard Square with John Robinson and Chris Trude from my Lifegroup. It was a pretty cool concert. I wasn't really familiar with their music beforehand, but I really enjoyed it. They are a Christian rock band.