Well, I’ve pretty much resigned to the thought that I could be a regular blogger.  As many times as I’ve said it, you’d think I’d follow through.  I shall henceforth be known as The Occasional Blogger, even if I’m the only one to ever refer to myself as such.  I probably could also call myself The Guy Who Complains About Not Blogging Enough Every Time He Does Blog, but that’s quite a mouthful, so let’s stick with the former, okay?

On to bigger and better things…

I am now once again a reader.  Well, that might be a bit of a stretch, but I’m getting there.  I remember a time when, if given the choice, I’d choose to read for fun.  My imagination was filled with the stories of the Boxcar Children and the Hardy Boys, not to mention Aslan and crew from the Chronicles of Narnia.  Unfortunately, those days ended when I started 5th grade at a new school.  Suddenly, I learned what homework was and forgot what reading was.  Well, now that I am no longer a student of any formal institution, I have the responsibility of making the choice to continue my education on my own.  I suppose that’s what life is all about, but I feel like I’ll probably benefit a bit more by being proactive about it versus just breezing on through.  So anyway, I thought I’d share a couple lists with you.  The first one is fairly short, a list of books I’ve been working on recently:

C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed (completed), The Great Divorce, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (re-reading)
John Eldredge - Wild at Heart (completed)
Mark Batterson - In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day

I set aside The Great Divorce a while back, in favor of Wild at Heart, but now that it’s complete, I’ll get back to it.  I needed a break from deeply thoughtful reading, so I decided to invoke my imagination and re-read The Chronicles of Narnia.  I don’t have to sort through syntax to get to the meaning; I can just immerse myself in the story, and I love that.  Reading those books is like watching a movie to me.  Anyway, the second list is my “To read” list.  They’re just sitting there on my shelf, waiting for me.  We’ll see how long this takes.

Erwin McManus - The Barbarian Way
Becky Tirabassi - Sacred Obsession (for student ministries next fall)
John Piper - The Passion of Jesus Christ
Steve Brown - A Scandalous Freedom
Gene Edwards - A Tale of Three Kings (re-read)
Ron Owens - Return to Worship
Bill Hybels - Too Busy Not to Pray
Rory Noland - The Heart of the Artist (I’ve tried to read this a number of times and just never finished)
Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Supremacy (Same story here) and The Bourne Ultimatum
Thom S. Rainer & Eric Geiger - Simple Church
C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia

I’m sure that list is incomplete, but those are all the books and I can think of at this point.  I’ve also been recommended The Shack, but I don’t have it, so I’ll have to borrow from someone.

Ok, I think that’s enough for today.  I need to leave in 20 minutes for Pendleton, and I want to get a chapter or two more done in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

For Narnia and for Aslan!

Well, everyone…exciting news.  I got tags working.  I’m not sure what this means for either of us, but at least my Wordpress theme is that much more up to date.

Well, according to my blog stats, I haven’t had a visitor to my actual blog site in quite a while, which makes me a bit sad. But maybe, just maybe, people are reading my blog on other sites like Facebook or Virb, which are set to import posts from this blog. Anyway, I recently got back from a trip to Florida with Cook and Belle. We played at the South Florida Fair…15 shows in 5 days. On the return trip, we detoured to Missouri where we played a show at the Missouri Association of Fairs and Festivals convention in hopes of booking summer gigs at Missouri county fairs. I’m pretty sure we’ve already got a pretty significant amount of summer gigs booked with a number of others in progress. In other related news, I’ve begun to play for another young female country artist. Her name is Casey Jamerson, and she’s from Pendleton. We’ve played a couple gigs at the Moon Dog Tavern on 96th Street in Indy, and there are at least a few more shows coming up in the next few months. It would be nice if her shows started to pick up in the fall, about the same time as Cook and Belle’s start to dwindle. That way, I could have a pretty solid few months of playing regularly. Anyway, I should probably get going. I’m hanging out with my friend Amy tonight (hopefully), and I’d like to run to Castleton and hit up Guitar Center as well as Best Buy. I need to replace a keyboard pedal at GC, and Best Buy has a great deal on an external hard drive.

I’ve been learning Boston’s “Foreplay” on the keys (so Micah, Cliff, Brad, and I can rock it out), so I created a funky jam to relieve a little stress (Foreplay ain’t easy *snicker*). You can find it many places:

www.virb.com/mattulrich
www.myspace.com/mattulrich
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6614417606

The rhythm track (everything that’s not keyboards) was created in Reason, and the rest came from my lovely Nord Electro 2 and my mind/fingers. Most of it is pretty unpolished, but I suppose that’s what jamming is all about. Hopefully you enjoy it!

For those of you reading this at blog.mattulrich.com, you may notice a few minor updates. I finally figured out how to get the archives to display with a drop-down box rather than a lengthy list of every month of posts since this blog opened. I also finally updated to 2.2.3 from 2.0.7. 2.3 will be out soon, so hopefully that’ll come shortly. I think if I ever get some time, I want to do a complete redo of my entire website, basing it primarily around this blog, and using Wordpress’ page creation ability for any other content I desire to add. But let us be honest…you don’t really care about the technical jargon. You just want a good end-user experience. Well, let me tell you: that’s what I’m aiming at.

It’s funny really. Every time I’m up way too late, I usually end up getting the song “Breathe (2AM)” by Anna Nalick stuck in my head. Then what usually happens is that I look at the clock and find that it is, indeed, just about 2 in the A.M. Weird, I know. You know what else usually happens when I’m up way too late? I start thinking about what little sleep I will be getting even if I were to go to bed immediately, and it makes me feel worse because I know I’ll feel exhausted tomorrow. Then when I wake up in the morning, I find that I was right about how I’d feel. It’s a pretty vicious cycle, and to be honest, I’m not much of a fan. There’s something to be said about staying up late if there’s a reason such as work that needs to be done, friends that need to be talked to or hung out with, or an indefinite (but definitely late) wake-up time. Anyway, here I find myself once again in the same situation. If there wasn’t Wi-Fi where I’m currently living, I’d have been dead to the world for a few hours by now, but alas, I find myself distracted. I actually wish that was the case. I usually can’t seem to pull myself away in a timely manner, and tonight is no different.

Anyway, since I hadn’t blogged in a while, I thought I’d stop in and say hi. I am currently living with Pastor Mick (my worship pastor and boss) while I make some life decisions, including one regarding where to live. I’ve been enjoying a summer of playing country music with Cook and Belle and working at the church. I was recently reminded by a commenter on this blog that I had made a list of everyone I could think of who was engaged (found in my October 15, ‘06 post). That list had, I believe, 13 people on it, and I do believe most, if not all, of them are now married. Also married are some other people who I did not include in the list either because I didn’t know they were engaged at the time or I simply couldn’t remember them while writing the list. I could get all emo and cry about how I’m still single and really not content with it, but I won’t. You probably are thanking me for not going there, which means we are becoming closer and friendlier. (If that’s the case, and you’re a single, attractive female, call me.)

That is all. Must…go…to…bed. Night.

Today is my birthday, and I celebrated by grilling myself, and by “grilling myself,” I mean getting extremely sunburned under 100+ degree heat at a water park. Now I hurt. Oh well.

Jon’s song “Beautiful Disaster” is Single of the Week on the iTunes music store! You should check it out.

Matt