Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

Last weekend (Memorial Day weekend) my family and I went camping with a friend. It was my daughter's first real camping trip (besides the basement/backyard), my wife's first camping trip that she can remember, and my first camping trip since I was a child. That's why we chose a friend to go with - he has a lot of experience and has a lot of the gear we were missing. We chose to only go 1 night, which meant we had to go Sunday night. (If you picked Friday or Saturday on a holiday weekend, there was a 2 night minimum). We were basically limiting ourselves to the sites where someone picked Friday and Saturday night and left on Sunday so we could take their spot. We found a place about a half hour away. We couldn't have asked for better weather. It was gorgeous, not very windy, and not even a hint of rain. Temperatures were in the 80's during the day and got to around the mid 60's at night. It was a little cool at night, but not overly so. (I woke up early in th...

I spent the last two days at a conference called FILO  (stands for "first in, last out" meaning that technical people are the ones that are the first to arrive and last to leave when they work at church). It was a very interesting conference and I learned quite a bit. The problem that I, personally, had with it is that I'm a volunteer at church (although there were a lot of volunteers there). So I'm really only working a couple Sundays a month and nothing during the week. A lot of the information would be more relevant if I was putting in more time at church. Even so, I still got a lot of good information. One thing that was really good about the conference was to find out what other churches are doing. Church congregation sizes are fairly easy to find. And you can see online replays of services and get an idea about how many cameras they run, but you don't know how many people they have in the booth, how many cameras are remote controlled, what kind of audio an...

Last night the UPS driver delivered our brand new tent. Even though we had other stuff going on, I just had to put it up in the basement to see how it looks. The instructions were horrible - if they were in a foreign language it wouldn't have been any worse than they were. But I eventually figured it out and it looks pretty good. It's big (6 person) which is what we wanted - from my (very limited) experience, an "x" person tent comfortably fits about "1/2 x" people, or maybe a little more. Meaning, a 4 person tent is good for 2-3 people. So the 6 person tent would be good for 3-4 people. We're going to try it out for real in a couple weeks when we go camping. My daughter is excited about camping, but my wife isn't. We'll have to see how everything goes with this trip. Going forward, it may be something that my daughter and I do together instead of being a full family thing.