There's no place like home...

I'm entirely too tired right now to come up with a better title for this, but nonetheless, it has occurred to me that if I'm going to use movie titles as references, I need to start using much more manly ones than Sex and the City or The Wizard of Oz.

Anyway, I know the number of people who even noticed my blog was even more inactive than usual is slightly smaller than the number of people who noticed when Katherine Heigl starred in Zyzzyx Road. But for those of you who did, this one's for you.

I'll start with the good news: I'm posting from my Mac! About seven weeks ago, my MacBook Pro mysteriously ceased to function (a lot like Sarah Palin when she joined Fox News). I was very distressed, thinking I'd lost my hard drive. I finally had my buddy Adam work on it, and he not only narrowed down the problem to my motherboard instead of the hard drive, he even backed it up for me. Then, after taking the computer to Connecting Point, they informed me that the issue was covered under warranty! So about a week ago, I got my computer back completely repaired for free, instead of paying $2k for a new computer or $900 for a new motherboard!

Now for the other good news: I'm back on the West Coast! I got back to Oregon after an epic, expensive, and possibly ill-advised road trip with my best friend Robby Hill. I've got a couple blogs I started working on that I have to finish, so I'll try to have some regular posts recapping that trip in the next couple weeks. Let's just say by day two we stopped staying in any hotels that weren't at least four star, we've sampled more local microbrews from across the country than I'd ever even heard of, and we spent more than ten times on the drive back to Oregon than I did on the way to New York.

Without getting into too much detail, at the end of the summer, I spent a lot of time considering what I'd accomplished (and could look forward to accomplishing) in New York, and what my opportunities in Oregon would be, and I felt like God wanted me here. I have a great church family here (not to mention real family), I'm helping start a new young adult ministry at that church, Living Waters, and I feel like I'm moving forward with a lot of things. I couldn't be happier to have stayed in NY for a while and seen my family, and I'm glad I took the opportunity when I had it. I may still wind up back in New York later. But for now, I plan on doing some more traveling that God's laid on my heart over the next year or so, and using Oregon as a home base for doing that.

So that's my belated mini-update. Like I said, hopefully I'll have some fun stories worth reading up in the next couple days. And if things go as I hope they will, I will have plenty of very, very exciting things to be writing about over the next several months. Thanks to all who've kept in touch and supported me with everything!