Lotsa shit but I MUST CARRY ON!

No I'm not willing my ass through difficult times. I have had difficult times these past few days, as you will all see in awhile, but really, my Christian faith has kept me buoyant as the Titanic.

Well, Superstar Virgo. More accurate + support local (or near-local) products.

Going for Campus Ministry, or rather Arrow Ministry youth service at my church on Saturday, I arrived at 1pm to setup up the sound equipment, coincidentally along with my audio engineering shifu Clement, brought in from main church to mentor us campus/arrow sound ministry peeps (ie. junior sound ministry). So immediately I went into the storeroom and dismantled the flight case covers before wheeling the mixer out. Brought the backup singers' and guitar mikes up to the stage for the logistics to setup, then went back to the mixer to setup the wireless mikes.

My pastor uses a earhook piece, I dunno what you call that type of mike but we call it the Countryman, it's brand name. As I gently extracted the $1000+ infant from its case, I noticed...

The mike's filter sponge was missing.

Immediately after I'd confirmed that it did not fall into the casing or on the floor as I extracted it, he made calls to his sound ministry head, and then to my cluster leader (SIM SMU & Private Education cluster leader), who probably happens to be in sound logistics or I dunno what la, to inform them of the situation. After he got off the hook, he looked at me heavily and said, 'One filter costs $20.'

That bloody sponge can't be bigger than anyone's last fingernail. Those who leave that nail to grow to... er... interesting lengths don't count. But as he said, for us at New Creation (frankly speaking), money isn't a problem. Hell, our pastor even said that if all the admin and proposals pass, a building of our own, just for the youth ministry, is easily affordable financially to the church. But little things like these hinder the smoothness of the operation, having to add another item on your list, call the distributor, order, collect, pay, etc.etc.etc. Just not worth it, time-wise.

Then after that I carelessly took the two standby wireless mikes that we were borrowing (not youth ministry property) and left it among the other mikes, one of which was an identical model. My eyes could very well tell the difference between the fresh colors of the borrowed mikes' grills, and the duller one of the usual one, but I still got a verbal hiding from my shifu. Because not everyone else could. He insisted for the signals to be tallied with the receivers to distinguish the mikes.

As expected, some extra work had to be done to compensate for the loss of the Countryman filter. Shifu had to EQ the mike to de-emphasize the pickup of spitting sounds, namely 'P' sounds, and stuff like that. If it had been us, we probably would have been distracted from a good mix with the EQ at the back of our heads. At the back of our heads and desperately trying to push its way forth.

After I got back from church I discussed with Ryan on MSN whether we should shift our anime blog to a server of our own, or to Blogger. I got terribly disillusioned with wordpress.com's templates, because they leave very little space for creativity.

Also, the whole site just looks so cold to me.

Members from ping.sg confirmed, both through private emails and shoutbox chats, that wordpress.org, the blogging software for your own server, is the one that everyone's yelling about. Not wordpress.com, the online service. If Blogger offers a downloadable client, that would totally seal the blogging market's fate I think. But maybe not, now that they're under Google.

So anyway, Ryan (as usual la actually) came down rather hard on me by raining questions as to the benefits of having our own site. Because no matter how little we're paying for server space ($24/year for 1GB), there's still no need to waste money if there aren't returns. And basically, there isn't any, really, because I merely thought of taking this opportunity of a new blog to try out newer blog utilities, such as Technorati, Akismet, MyBlogLog, Flickr, etc.etc.etc.etc.etc. And as I pointed out in our convo, what benefits are there to project when you're trying stuff for the first time? Except for 'might bring us more readership'. And that's not even a benefit, that's like, a guess.

But I didn't give in or give up and let him win the debate, because it is our joint blog after all, and the least I could do is satisfy his questions as a partner. And since he has a desire to learn more about blog administration, it wouldn't do to 1) blast ahead with my geeky fantasies and leaving him choking in the dust or 2) tell him to blog and leave the rest to me. Even if I tried to do that, he wouldn't allow me anyway. Haha.

So our discussion ended at 1am, with me flatlined (what's new right) and asking him to pray for me to wake up in time because I was serving the next day on Sunday, and I had to be at Suntec Convention Centre by 730am. Before I slept, I also said a short prayer to give me good rest and strength to wake up in time.

I woke up at 8 o'clock.

The cab fare was quite a blow on my finances, considering... well never mind the point is that there were other things to settle financially and it's gone abit tight this week.

And I was tired the whole day, on Sunday. Usually while other people complain of the side effects of exhaustion of serving in Children's Church, I'm quite fine with it. After the 4th service at the main church ended, however, I told my fellow Children's Church server that I definitely could not miss the complimentary CD given on my next date of service. Because nothing went in. I was so tired I spilt the communion Ribena on my lap as I dozed off while closing my eyes in prayer can you believe it.

Whatever. Lookin' forward to a good week!