Thursday, June 14, 2007
SO- what are YOUR thoughts about Myspace?
Okay. We’re going to be serious for the next couple of days. This is Chauntay speaking. A dear cousin/friend of mine sent out a mass email about myspace and its harmful ways. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think myspace is God’s gift to teenagers, but at the same time, I also don’t think you are going straight to Hell in a handbasket for having an account on Myspace either. At any rate Alicia and I have decided to talk about our somewhat different views on this topic. Hope you enjoy. Alicia has today and I'll have tomorrow. And oh yeah, we promise to be fun next week!! :)
My thoughts on myspace
This is not a new subject but it does take some people a while to catch up with technology or catch on to technology. I will admit that I just recently forced myself to learn text messaging and I try to appreciate this mode of communication. I will also admit that I don’t have nor do I ever plan to have a myspace account. I’m just fine with communicating via e-mail, phone calls, and yes, text messaging. However, my quizzers all have myspace accounts and I do check them from time to time or have another assistant coach (example Chauntay) let me know if she sees something on a quizzers’ page that would be of interest to me.
This tool is an easy resource for keeping up with teenagers, who their friends are, their thoughts, fears, activities, etc. This generation of teenagers wants to share their thoughts and feelings; they want to be heard; they do not usually want to talk to adults face to face about any of this.
“I Love Technology”
The consistent stand for the Apostolic movement is to always be upset or against new technology no matter what. Myspace is the newest thing to be upset about and not try to understand. I don’t like it. I don’t like anything that wastes hours of time, but I do like to know what my quizzers are doing and thinking from time to time when they don’t feel like sharing with me. Are there dangers to myspace? I’m sure there are and I would hope responsible adults take some time to research these dangers and communicate to their kids, youth groups, quiz teams how to avoid the dangers.
Just a couple weeks ago I was sharing with a 19 year old girl from church that is looking for a job to be sure her myspace doesn’t portray her in a negative light since prospective employers (and universities) now check these profiles. This shocked her but did make her think about the image she is displaying for the world to see should they so choose.
What are we so upset about?
Why are some people all worked up about this issue? Is it the time management problem? Can’t we always find something to get upset about that wastes our time? Is it the potential dangers? Can’t we address them? Is it the access to porn? While that’s a whole separate problem, myspace is not the only avenue to that and the issue again to address is porn itself, not myspace. I realize I’m not a parent but I do have several kids that I feel very responsible for and they are going to have myspace accounts whether I get my own or not. So, to bury our heads in the sand is not going to make the “problem” go away. If it is human nature to fear what you don’t understand, it only seems logical to be sure we understand this phenomenon better and accept it as part of our culture in the 21st century.
Questions, comments, concerns? Please feel free to E-mail me!
My thoughts on myspace
This is not a new subject but it does take some people a while to catch up with technology or catch on to technology. I will admit that I just recently forced myself to learn text messaging and I try to appreciate this mode of communication. I will also admit that I don’t have nor do I ever plan to have a myspace account. I’m just fine with communicating via e-mail, phone calls, and yes, text messaging. However, my quizzers all have myspace accounts and I do check them from time to time or have another assistant coach (example Chauntay) let me know if she sees something on a quizzers’ page that would be of interest to me.
This tool is an easy resource for keeping up with teenagers, who their friends are, their thoughts, fears, activities, etc. This generation of teenagers wants to share their thoughts and feelings; they want to be heard; they do not usually want to talk to adults face to face about any of this.
“I Love Technology”
The consistent stand for the Apostolic movement is to always be upset or against new technology no matter what. Myspace is the newest thing to be upset about and not try to understand. I don’t like it. I don’t like anything that wastes hours of time, but I do like to know what my quizzers are doing and thinking from time to time when they don’t feel like sharing with me. Are there dangers to myspace? I’m sure there are and I would hope responsible adults take some time to research these dangers and communicate to their kids, youth groups, quiz teams how to avoid the dangers.
Just a couple weeks ago I was sharing with a 19 year old girl from church that is looking for a job to be sure her myspace doesn’t portray her in a negative light since prospective employers (and universities) now check these profiles. This shocked her but did make her think about the image she is displaying for the world to see should they so choose.
What are we so upset about?
Why are some people all worked up about this issue? Is it the time management problem? Can’t we always find something to get upset about that wastes our time? Is it the potential dangers? Can’t we address them? Is it the access to porn? While that’s a whole separate problem, myspace is not the only avenue to that and the issue again to address is porn itself, not myspace. I realize I’m not a parent but I do have several kids that I feel very responsible for and they are going to have myspace accounts whether I get my own or not. So, to bury our heads in the sand is not going to make the “problem” go away. If it is human nature to fear what you don’t understand, it only seems logical to be sure we understand this phenomenon better and accept it as part of our culture in the 21st century.
Questions, comments, concerns? Please feel free to E-mail me!
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
He's a player. Game Over.
These words were used to describe a friend of mine a few weeks back when a coworker of mine met him. I [Alicia] mean briefly met him. How was he able to size up my friend so quickly and as it turned out so accurately? While said friend and I were just friends, my coworker did feel the need to give me his impression which I filed away and thought ridiculous. I do like to get input from my friends both male and female when embarking on a relationship with someone new, but I also pride myself in being a very good judge of character and in picking up on positive and negative vibes.
This got me thinking about the subconscious signals we give off with first impressions. It also reiterated that men can notice things about other men that I may never pick up on or certainly not as quickly.
I’m not twelve.
So had a mild disagreement with aforementioned friend about his dating practices that I had observed and had some questions about. Needless to say he didn’t appreciate the questioning and the mild disagreement sort of escalated. The next time I saw him the conversation was tense which puzzled me. Blake agreed that it appeared tense but told me he didn’t think I could fix things because neither he nor I were twelve. I took this as a challenge to just address the situation apologize for whatever and move on. This did seem to alleviate the problem.
Take the high road
This has become my new motto this year for several situations. While not always fun, I wanted to share that this approach has worked extremely well and that I am now recommending this when faced with difficult people/situations. I feel that it worked on the above situation but may be too soon to tell.
Questions, comments, concerns? Please feel free to E-mail me!
This got me thinking about the subconscious signals we give off with first impressions. It also reiterated that men can notice things about other men that I may never pick up on or certainly not as quickly.
I’m not twelve.
So had a mild disagreement with aforementioned friend about his dating practices that I had observed and had some questions about. Needless to say he didn’t appreciate the questioning and the mild disagreement sort of escalated. The next time I saw him the conversation was tense which puzzled me. Blake agreed that it appeared tense but told me he didn’t think I could fix things because neither he nor I were twelve. I took this as a challenge to just address the situation apologize for whatever and move on. This did seem to alleviate the problem.
Take the high road
This has become my new motto this year for several situations. While not always fun, I wanted to share that this approach has worked extremely well and that I am now recommending this when faced with difficult people/situations. I feel that it worked on the above situation but may be too soon to tell.
Questions, comments, concerns? Please feel free to E-mail me!
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The JOYS of Fundraising: Our Egg Roll Experience
Egg Rolling Champs!!
If you have ever coached Bible quizzing, or any other organized activity, then you must know how important fundraisers are. Over the years we have washed many cars, made many chocolate covered peanut butter or coconut Easter eggs, and catered the random special dinner. The big fundraiser for the year for our teams is making egg rolls and selling them $10/dozen to all who place orders. Our church has an Asian work that is part of our church and meets separately. The Asian pastor’s wife, Lamphong helps us each year making these egg rolls. It is an amazing amount of work, but they are really great egg rolls.So, this past Saturday I [Alicia] met Lamphong at an Asian market to purchase the egg roll wrappers and the noodles that go in these that you cannot find at your local Kroger. Chauntay and I had already been to Sam’s last week to buy meat, eggs and containers and I had a hook up from Jennifer at Chick-Fil-A for the cabbage and carrots and peanut oil (this apparently has become a precious commodity). This ordeal culminated at church Saturday afternoon with all my quizzers and coaches and few other helpers cutting up cabbage, frying meat, mixing up everything, and finally rolling 1,400 (yes 1,400) egg rolls. Then Sunday morning Arlen, Blake, Kimberly, myself and a couple other helpers fried up each egg roll with love and prayer to sell after Sunday morning service while Chauntay organized and alphabetized the orders in the kitchen.
Okay, Chauntay speaking, let me go ahead and say you have NO idea how hard it is to make egg rolls. I have a new respect for the Asian population, ha. It’s seriously hard work. That cabbage is hard work. I don’t know how they cut it daily. No clue. Okay, let me paint the picture for you. We get to the church, and since we are not in church hours, the air is obviously looow. This means it’s hot normally. Okay we get there and everyone gets assigned to a station. We have our cabbage, carrot, and onion choppers, our meat fryers, and noodle experts. We are chopping away for probably almost two hours. Then we have Kap and Lamphong (our resident experts), who we affectionately referred to as quality control, or aka the Asian Nazi. We would get a lecture if it wasn’t just right. Kap ostracized me to everyone that my cabbage was “to big”.
L-R: Olivia, myself, and Sang chopping cabbage..thats all we had left
Table 1, L-R: Charlene and Lause
Table 2, L-R: Sang, Mom, Olivia, Alicia, Kimberly (I was taking the picture, I promise worked)
Table 3, L-R: Odigene, Dadie, Blake, Kap, and Catherine
Anyway, as we constantly are rolling (for the next several hours) we have Arlen and Ernzo heating up the wrappers and keeping us replenished. We also have someone restocking our eggs (used to seal the egg rolls) and someone restocking our mixture for rolling. About halfway through I got up to start the massive cleaning process. We used just about every large pan/bowl/knife that our church owns, none of which (save the silverware/plates) can fit inside the dishwasher. Lucky me, the OCD coach got to clean. I love to clean, sad I know. Anyway, after a trip to the store for additional wrappers (thanks Arlen and Ernzo), lots of American slurs from the Asians, we finally finished rolling, cleaning, dishes, laundry, and mopping by around 8:30 pm. By then we deemed it necessary to reward ourselves with dinner at Jim n Nicks, one of my favorite restaurants here in town. Sunday morning when I arrived at church, imagine my happy surprise to see Arlen and Alicia having color coordinated. How sweet. Funny thing they both walked in the garage and realized they had the exact same lovely (not so much) lime green shirt on. Funny stuff. Anyway, as they slaved outside to fry everything, I slaved inside trying to find some sort of easy, quick proof system to distribute the 80 some odd dozen orders of egg rolls. Fun Fun. Anyway, this is a very hard fundraiser, very lucrative, and just plain fun.
Alicia again, I dislike fundraisers but feel it is important to have some that the kids can participate in to give a sense of ownership and teach the value of money. It is also easy to see what a kid (or an adult) is made of when put to this type of work. We do manage to have a fun time and the experience of going to the Asian markets is hard to describe but the culture shock is very real.
I did survive the weekend, our quiz teams did make over $900 and I have decided one thing for next year: with the cost of peanut oil skyrocketing, I am going to have to go up to $12/dozen for the egg rolls.
Alicia again, I dislike fundraisers but feel it is important to have some that the kids can participate in to give a sense of ownership and teach the value of money. It is also easy to see what a kid (or an adult) is made of when put to this type of work. We do manage to have a fun time and the experience of going to the Asian markets is hard to describe but the culture shock is very real.
I did survive the weekend, our quiz teams did make over $900 and I have decided one thing for next year: with the cost of peanut oil skyrocketing, I am going to have to go up to $12/dozen for the egg rolls.
Alicia, Lamphong (our Asian Pastor's Wife), and myself
Anyone have any good fundraiser ideas or stories? We’d love to hear about them.
Questions, comments, concerns? Please feel free to E-mail me!
