Today is the day the Architectural Review Committee was supposed to meet and hopefully approve my landscaping plan. The 30 day process is now about 60 days old, and I'm getting bored of the 400 square feet of dead grass. I'm planning on calling the office on Monday morning to find out where things stand. Will they find another reason to deny it? We shall see.
Last week was the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. I was very impressed with the quality of speakers and the content. The clear winner was Gary Hamel. I wish I could get a recording of his talk, but it's not going to be made available. I had never heard of him before, but apparently he was the #1 most influential business person in 2008 according to the Wall Street Journal and is the most reprinted author of the Harvard Business Review. There's nothing that he said that is worth rambling about here, but everything he said was golden.
Coming away from the conference, I realized that I really haven't done any real reading in the past year or so. I've read some stuff, but I've really drifted away from reading things that are challenging. So I've decided that I'm going to buy some books from Amazon and try to start up that habit again.
The net effect of the Summit is that things are moving at church once again. I've started to push the governance change that we had hoped to pass a year ago, and it looks like it's on its way. The vote is scheduled for September 27, and we're getting a full informational blitz ready to go.
I'm in the middle of learning PHP/MySQL right now. I've been slowly toying around with it, but I want to get a little more focused. I think I've got all the basic structures down, which means I'm really just going to have to dump a lot of time into programming. I am looking for some place to host the programs when it's all finished. There's a chance of getting something on the school system's webpage, but I've got to wait and see whether it gets approved.
Next week marks the beginning of the new academic year. My textbook has not yet been printed. It worries me a little bit, but I trust the bookstore to make sure it happens. I've got the first couple weeks' notes ready to go for my other classes, but I've decided to wait until I get textbook in hand to get to work on that class. I don't know why, but there's something about holding the actual textbook that is more motivating than staring at a PDF.
I've started to settle back into a "normal" financial cycle. I no longer have to pay rent for the apartment, and most of the big house expenses have been covered (except for the landscaping). This means it's time to start saving up money again. I've got to get some emergency cash in place, and then I'll get back to playing some live poker. I'm thinking of playing poker at the casino down the street instead of going all the way to the strip. The game I'm now playing can be found there, and I've heard that the action is pretty good. But I probably won't go play for at least a few months.
