Carnivals and REVOLutions

     Last Sunday was the Westheights Carnival, which is a free event put on by our church (for the last 7 years now, but this was our first involvement). Beth and I worked the second shift from 5:30 - 8:00, she as the nurse and I helped run one of the bouncy castles. It was a lot of fun and there were over 3200 people from the neighbourhood that came out. There were games, rides, prizes, food, and a great performance by local award-winning juggler Bob Cates. It took about 170 volunteers to pull the whole thing off and it was great to be part of such an amazing team of people. Beth, David and I ended up helping clean the thousands of pieces of popcorn from the sanctuary rug - so we feel we really contributed;).
     Saw a couple of movies this week -  a few of us from the Friday night study group met on Tuesday to watch "Super 8" which is a pretty entertaining movie, though I'm not a huge fan of aliens stuff. Tonight (Sunday) Beth and I went to see "Midnight in Paris," the latest Woody Allen flick. The scenes of Paris sure brought back some wonderful memories of our 2006 trip. The main character also does some weird time travelling back to the 1920's, including scenes with Ernest Hemingway where they talk about his book "A Moveable Feast," and which I just took out from the library this week!
     Gary D. Schmidt has now become a favourite author after reading his latest novel, "Okay for Now," this week. He does such a fantastic job capturing the mindset of a grade 8 student, and creates quite an heroic character in Doug Swieteck, who faces a lot of adversity with great courage and even humour. I'm just about finished the 2nd book for the week, Shane Clairborne's "Irresistible Revolution." This is a very challenging memoir as he shares his journey of trying to really follow the teachings of Christ in a practical way - he spends time in Calcutta with Mother Teresa, travels to Iraq during the war, and lives in community in an impoverished neighbourhood of Philadelphia (to mention just a few of his adventures). I'm really looking forward to hearing him speak at the Wild Goose Festival.
      Had a nice but low-key Father's Day celebration today. Mom and Dad came over for a barbecue lunch. My card to my dad included a promise to do some golfing together this summer - I look forward to that. The kids are contributing to a new pair of Birkenstocks, but we went looking today and maybe I should just consider getting my old ones recorked. David dropped in later in the day as he was at the Hamilton airshow - and he got to fly back to Kitchener (as a passenger) in a recently restored T33 jet!
      Lots of music listening this week: Neal Morse - Testimony 2 (great progressive rock music but pretty amateurish lyrics), Monk - Quiver (cross between Jeff Johnson & Phil Keaggy), The Choir - Burning Like the Midnight Sun (love these guys a lot!), Denison Witmer - Are You a Dreamer? & The Ones Who Wait (new artist for me, he'll be at the Wild Goose - very nice acoustic guitar work and pretty songs but hasn't blow me away yet), U2 - No Line on the Horizon (really enjoy listening to their music), Amy Grant - Unguarded (80's pop, not too terribly dated).