Supafly.com

I’m on a quick flight from Santa Barbara back to Phoenix. I just finished a John Grisham paperback my father gave me for as a birthday present back in November of last year. I had every intention of reading it over the Thanksgiving break, but it was not possible given my workload with school.

On my dining room table I have a ten-inch stack of black binders filled with documents, notes, and assignments. Depending on which of my three classes I’m preparing for, I’ll start my day by fishing out two binders and begin working. I’m expected to master all of the knowledge about accounting, global marketing, and economics. It’s exhausting. Within two days I’ll be finished with these three subjects and I’ll have four days off until we start a new trimester.

Yesterday my sister Katie and her husband Brian have a new little baby named Jack David back in Georgia. I know that those two names will be with me for the rest of my life. Also yesterday others in my family attended a funeral in Arizona for my unborn nephew named Kolbe Michael. How do you write about these two experiences? There is such joy and pain in the hearts of people who are so close to me. I have not reconciled the juxtaposition of these two events. I’m lost in the emotions of both.

(Out the window to my right is the coast of Southern California with a few islands scattered in the distance.)

My father is now home safe after a two-week trip with Eric Martin to Haiti to help with the earthquake recovery efforts. He was deeply moved by his experience. We’ve spoken on the phone a few time since he’s returned home, but I believe the complexity of his experience cannot be communicated over the phone. I’ll be seeing him in a couple of weeks and I’m anxious to spend time with him and hear his stories.

I can’t wait to get home and be with Candyce and Norah again. It’s only been 36 hours but I miss them so much.

So last week we launched CatholicYouthMinistry.com after twelve consecutive months of hard work. To date, this is the most comprehensive website I’ve lead from napkin sketch to production. The website could’ve been built in half the time, but I wanted to include everyone at Life Teen in the project so they could offer input and get a first-hand experience of how the Web Team manages a multitude of priorities. If this were a web design and development blog, I could write for days about the victories within the project, but this is my personal blog and I’m trying to keep this from feeling like work.

But before I move on, let’s talk about the privilege of having a job. I think it’s only fair that if you are employed right now, you should stop and be thankful for what you have. Be positive in your workplace and do good work. There are many people who would love to have your “worries” in exchange for a paycheck. As my barber told me yesterday: “I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.”

I am NOT excited to restart classes in the MBA program. I’ve needed this winter break like Wall Street needed a bailout. The high expectations of both school and work totally wore me out in the last months of 2009, and I cannot say that I’ve regained my strength. But like it or not, I have an accounting class on Wednesday.

Sometimes I get confused about how to make priorities in this messy world. I mean, right now there are countless people buried alive in the rubble in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The earthquake has left people with so much suffering…I cannot even imagine. I got home from work yesterday and turned on the news to get a more up close look at what people were going through. The news reporter told the story of a man who lost is wife beneath a collapsed building. The husband pressed his hand against a the rubble and held his ear to a concrete slab hoping to hear her tapping below. The tapping came and went. The husband and the rescue workers prayed and dug. The segment ended with the sad reality that they had not found his wife.

The thought of losing Candyce or Norah shreds my heart. I cannot imagine the pain this guy is experiencing. At this very moment, I am sure he is still digging for his wife. Me? I am at here at Starbucks at the airport typing on my laptop. What’s my biggest problem right now? I don’t want to go to class. What’s your problem?

How am I supposed to reconcile my life of privilege with the misfortune of others?

I don’t know if there is a clear way to keep my own life moving forward while still caring for the rest of the planet. I do what I can, even if it’s not enough. …I pray for those in need. I donate money to worthy causes…I volunteer my time…I try to be a caring friend and neighbor.

I try not to get enthralled in the dazzle of the material world. Because it’s hard to be a genuine person if you are easily impressed by fortune and fame. I do try to be successful in what I do–career, education, investments–but I constantly remind myself that this too shall pass.

Ultimately, I try to be the best husband and father that I can be. If every man made their family their top priority, much of our society’s ills would wash away.

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Honestly, I am still unsettled about this. About how to make daily priorities in such a messy world. I need to pray more about this. And right now I need to finish this so I can get on my plane. Boston here I come.

For Christmas I gave Candyce’s parents a custom built-in media storage next to their fireplace. The home was built in 2002 or 2003 back when few people had flat panel TVs. So the builder created a deep vertical recess in the wall next to the fireplace about the size of an old phone booth.  I guess the idea was to have a discreet place to tuck in a television, a DVD player, and your DVD collection.

Unfortunately, the recess just does not function well with a modern-day flat panel television. Most homeowners in the neighborhood choose to hang their TVs above their fireplace because there it is centered in the room and has ample width for wide screens.

My goal was to build a cabinet within the recess that would hide the family’s TV junk like the DVD player, Blu Ray Player, X-Box, Wii, and Tivo. Plus, there needed to be plenty of room for the gaming accessories including the DJ Hero turntable, Rock Band instruments, and the numerous game controllers. I felt like that corner of the home had way too much packed into it and it always stressed me out. Plus everyone tripped over the stuff on their way out the back door. It was a hot mess.

So take a look at the photos…after the click, be sure to read the notes on the lower left.

I chose to use Pine for the shelves and Oak stained gray and then weathered for the exterior. I felt that the room had too many competing warm wood tone and I didn’t want to add yet another. The weathered gray also looks like driftwood that gathers on the shore. It’s casual and beachy.

Some details I added:

• Full-extension drawers
• Drilled holes with routed edges at the back center of each shelf. This makes it easy to feed wires up and down the cabinet
• The top half houses the media units that generate a lot of heat. The doors for this area will have stamped aluminum faces that will allow for plenty of air circulation.
• I plan on building custom bins made of Poplar to store DVDs, games, and controllers. Two bins will fit side-by-side on two shelves.

I believe that I would’ve gotten the project finished had it not been for the rain that slowed the drying of the stain on the wood. I look forward to finishing it in the future.

So tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I can confidently say that I accomplished every one of my New Year’s resolutions. I don’t want to go into detail about each resolution, but I do want to share about the dedication and drive that it took to accomplish these goals.

Before I move forward, I feel like I need to give some context here. I was raised on a farm and I know what it means to work hard. Those formative years set a high standard for myself that has never wavered; I have always worked hard at home, school, or at work. For me, working hard and with passion brings elevated meaning to even the most ordinary tasks. Anyone who knows me will be quick to tell you that I work with purpose and fervor. This will never change.

But what set 2009 apart from each previous year of hard work was that I was more deliberate with managing the twelve months of the year and the five days in a workweek. In short, I always began with the end in mind. I was focused on short- and long-term goals through each day of the past 364 days of this year. It was my most masterfully executed calendar year since graduating college. This allowed me to accomplish each of my New Year’s resolutions plus my massive professional workload.

So was all that work worth it? I guess that’s the big question that deep down I want to find an answer for and why I’m writing about the subject. If all I wanted to do was to publish my accomplishments this year, it would be simple enough to copy and paste all of my completed to-do lists from the year. But at the moment I am heavy with exhaustion that’s entirely unpleasant. I’m burned out. It is hard to know if it was worth it.

Here are my thoughts:

1. I doubt that everyone on my team at work appreciates what I’ve given to our organization over the past twelve months. That’s okay, because everyone was busy with their own work and they didn’t have the time to stop and appreciate my effort. As with most things in life, I will just have to be patient to see the impact of my labor. The reward won’t come with a bonus (we don’t have bonuses) or a promotion (we don’t have promotions), but with seeing our ministry grow and excel.
2. Part of the reason I worked so hard this year was because I wanted to see if I could do it. I know that the professional athletes that I most admire succeed because of their legendary effort, and I wanted to see if I could apply the same drive to my own life. I can say without a doubt that I gave legendary effort in 2009. Unlike professional athletes—however–I have no post-season where my team enters the playoffs and primed to dominate other teams. There is no deciding game where the victors hold the championship trophy high above their heads. Nobody gets the MVP trophy in my world. This kinda sucks.
3. Working so hard can make you self-absorbed. I started to think that the only thing that mattered on this planet is the stuff that I had to get done. It was hard to spontaneously make time to help friends when my schedule was packed so tightly. Plus when you’re consumed with ambition for twelve straight months, you don’t have much to talk about other than the stuff you’re doing. I wonder if I was a bore to listen to for a whole year.
4. It’s hard to live in the moment. One example that comes to mind was when Candyce drove me to the airport. I had just finished my midterm at school the night before and was soon going out of town for a long weekend. I knew that as soon as I returned, I would be preparing for class assignments for another five days straight. So that 20-minute drive to the airport should’ve been spent just enjoying the company of my kind and beautiful wife. But instead I was completely consumed with the next seven days. I got on the airplane feeling lonely and unfulfilled.
5. Let there be no confusion here: getting a master’s degree while still working full time is difficult for anyone, but especially for a married man with a family. I know that many people have done it before me, so I try not to get too intimidated by the insane amount of work I have to do each day. But I’ve learned that an overbooked lifestyle starts to make you feel like someone else is running your life. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I started this whole thing so that I could get my control over my future.

So there you have it—a blog update from an exhausted man after a long year of hard work. I would like to come up with a clever way to pull this whole thing together, but I’m out of energy. The end.

Here are some interesting photos I snapped through the window of our airplane. You can see the different textures on the earth over 400 miles.