Supafly.com

I got so much work done yesterday on my new patio. I don’t think that is an interesting sentence to begin a journal entry, but I can’t help but be excited about how my landscaping is finally coming together. Candyce is out of town, and the summer is heating up, so it’s time to work hard and get the landscaping done while I still can.

I woke up at six on Saturday morning and got right to work. I leveled and packed 250 square feet of sand, and then laid bricks on top. It was a brutal day of work, but after ten hours, I was so proud of my progress. I couldn’t believe I got so much on one day.

I slept in on Sunday because my body was too tired to start early again. I finally slipped on my work gloves at 10:30 AM, and I just couldn’t motivate myself to start working. I just stood in my yard and stared at the unfinished brick patio. Basically, the bricks that make the swooping edge of the patio were not even, and I didn’t know how I was going to fix that. I wondered if I had laid down a crappy foundation.

So I ignored that problem and built up my confidence with the small task of sweeping sand into the cracks in between the bricks. That got me moving, and I just kept going for the next ten hours. I put in a few hours to fix the edge, and then everything started to magically come together–almost like making a jig saw puzzle. It was so exciting to see what was once in my head now beneath my feet. So cool!

I moved ten wheel barrow’s full of sand off my driveway, finally giving myself my parking space back. That pile of sand used to be five feet tall and fifteen feet wide. Now it’s all gone! It was such a pleasure to back my car back into the parking spot.

I finished the night by doing what my dad always did when I was a kid–I walked around and looked at my work for an hour. I love it!

:::

Now that my landscaping is cleaning up, I’ve started to plan out all the lighting. Pretty soon this is going to be quite a party pad.

Our printing company sent me some samples of the T-shirts I designed for our summer camps. I am a vain designer, so I draped the shirts on the couch in my office, and then on the backs of chairs. I can sit at my desk and admire my work. I need to put a portfolio on this site. I have a lot of quality work that I’ve done since I graduated college, and I want to show everyone so they’ll be proud of me.

Today was a super-busy day at work. But it’s probably the best kind of busy you can get. The past two years have been just getting this website together…working with countless people. Now all of those people are out of the way, and the hours I have at work go directly to updating the site and connecting with 8000 visitors per day. I probably update the site 15-20 times each day. And we have high-dollar content like radio shows, videos, and in-depth features. It’s fun stuff.

Tonight a big posse of friend met up at Four Peaks Brewery to say goodbye to Jen. It was such a big, awesome group of friends. We ate and drank and laughed. They are just such wonderful, interesting, and happy people. I wish I could’ve invited old friends from Georgia, or maybe my brothers. It’s just too good not to share.

I got home and there were ten or so guys hanging out at my house. It looks like Matt Maher got a ping-pong table and put it on the back porch. He also dug out his radio controlled car from high school and was playing in the backyard. My new landscaping is a better play space than I used to see on the commercials as a kid. It was a real fun house.

I’m back here in my room trying to unwind while the party is still going on everywhere else in the house. To think I started this journal talking about my portfolio.

I gave a talk tonight at XLT and I think it turned out pretty well. You can listen to it <a href=”http://www.lifeteen.com/default.aspx?PageID=XLHOME&__DocumentId=44720″ target=”_blank”>here</a>.

I’m way too busy at work, and it’s breaking my spirit. This spring at the studio has been so insanely busy and I don’t think anyone understands. I know everyone likes to think they are the busiest, hardest working person they know. But realistically, I am the only person who runs lifeteen.com. The new website we launched in February is ten times the size of the old website, and I’m still the only one running it. Since we haven’t hired anyone to help me, I’ve had to put in so many extra hours to make up for it. I am getting a year-long intern starting in three weeks. That will help me quite a bit.

But I can’t help but look back over the past spring and without my heart aching. I was very overwhelmed three months ago because I realized there was not enough time in the day for me to meet all my deadlines for the spring. I asked for a temporary intern to come in and help me with all work. I was told that we couldn’t get an intern until June. I said okay because I understand that we are trying to save money. But their “not yet” meant that I would have to continue to work at a torturous pace.

If I keep on writing about this, my emotions are going to keep pumping, and I’ll end up writing things that I regret. But what I’ve learned this spring that people who work in non-profit youth ministry do not understand the demands of having a website. The rules they are used to do not work with what I do. I have to make people understand this, or I will end up going crazy.

This morning Candyce and I left the house to get some coffee and explore some neighborhoods here at the beach. Since I was eighteen and moved out of my parents’ house, I’ve loved traveling the country and exploring the neighborhoods in each city.

Watching Atlanta clean up through the late 1990s. New York is as cool as you get, and there’s not much more to say about that. Phoenix is always growing, but the growth isn’t particularly interesting. But beach towns are wacky and that’s just what I love. Candyce loves it too, so this day was destined to be a lot of fun.

There’s no way we’ll get a house on the beach. Even the smallest shack on the beach will cost you $3,000,000. And any shack within walking distance to the beach is at least $2,000,000. Which is stupid because the beach is filled with traffic and noise. I can’t imagine paying that much to live in the middle of that commotion just so you can walk to the beach. And for many of the houses, you can’t even SEE the beach. You just know it’s there. Stupid.

Part of me wonders when this whole Southern California housing market will finally get real. I mean, are people’s salaries increasing at 10% a year to keep up with the housing market? At what point to companies move out of the state b/c they can’t afford to pay people enough to cover their mortgage. I just think people have stopped using their heads.

So after a day of exploring, Candyce and I found two neighborhoods that had good views and a good vibe at a “reasonable” price. Both neighborhoods were on the tall hills that line the shore, giving almost every home a view of the ocean. They were developed in the late 80s as middle-class homes homes for working people. Since then, big dollar houses have surrounded each spot. But only a handful of homes had been updated since they were first built. I’d love to pick up one of those houses and start working on it.

I was really charmed by the hillside because you were high enough to get away from all of the commotion. It’s no fun going to bed when you can hear cars driving past your window. Up there, you felt like the king of the ocean. I could go on about this forever, but I’d rather go back in the other room and just talk about it with Candyce. Fun!

Today I upgraded to a better package with my server that will allow me to store more files. What the company didn’t tell me was that they I had to download everyone of my sites, and the upload them to my new server. So anyway…that’s what I’ve been doing today, and it’s not fun. It’s not cool. It’s just something you have to do.

I’m still out here in San Diego. I thought I was going to fly back this morning, but I still don’t want to go back to work. It’s June now, and Phoenix is cooking up with the summer heat. It’s perfect weather outside here in San Diego, and it’s perfect inside spending time with Candyce.

One fun thing that Candyce and I have done is picking up her brothers and sisters from school. They think it’s so cool when we pick them up, and it’s fun for us too. So that’s what we’ve done the past couple of days. Where I’m from, the parent pickup line is a row of country people in their country cars. But out here at the beach, it’s just a bunch of grown up skater dudes and beach babes.

There. I just finished reloading supafly.com, and it’ll start showing up sometime by the end of today. Websites are a lot of maintenance. Once you’ve built a website, you really come to appreciate other folk’s sites. I never would’ve imagined six years ago when I started supafly.com that I’d be here today. Life is good.