I got back from the Foundry retreat yesterday. Our speaker was Chris Mueller. We stayed at the Hyatt in Newport Beach. Foundry retreats are a bit more expensive than the college retreats I've been to ($175!!), but then I just found out that Crossroads are up to $150 and they have to go to Riverside. So maybe it's not as bad as I thought. Anyways, the events were alot of fun. The talent show featured many talented people as well as many untalented people still most were entertaining. People kept asking me what I was going to do for the show. I thought this was interesting since I never planned on doing anything. Most people have only seen my theater talents in the form of the Prop Skit competition where my roommate, Chris, and I had won two times in a row. Basically, that's where you get a partner and a bunch of normal items and develop a skit to perform that uses these items in no way people would expect. You get one night to think up an idea and perform it the next morning for everybody. The best skit out of 5 teams wins. Anyways, since I had to do this already, I didn't consider entering in the talent show as well to do more of the same. I don't really like performing on stage anyways. Well, I like it and I hate it at the same time. I hate all the time up to the performance and then I like to make people laugh.

Anyways, Chris and I laugh about how we got mixed up in this prop thing to begin with. The first time we were not told it was a competition. Our pastor just asked for volunteers to be in a skit. So after volunteering, we were told to grab a partner and compete against each other. Whoa, talk about bait and switch. It's really hard to do a good skit. You really need the right company. I didn't know Chris at the time and we paired up only because everyone else was so quick to grab somebody. So we kinda looked at each other, shrugged, and said, "Let's get on with this." The rest is history. We won the first competition and ever since we have to keep competing to "defend" our title. What makes it hard is first we have to live up to the hype from our pastor, and then we can't do the same thing we did before since that's what people would expect us to do. We always have to be one step ahead of our competition. So this was our third crack at it. So I guess either people didn't know about the competition this time or people were intimidated since we didn't have four teams to challenge us right away. Then by the next day, two of the teams dropped out, and one had overslept. It kinda stinks what happened, but our pastor basically told the other team that he was just going to let the champions do an exhibition. I think the reason for that is because in the past, no skit has been close to ours. I don't say that because we are so awesome, but when you have an actor paired up with someone who has done over 60 skits in the past 7 years for large groups of people, you just can't beat experience. Anyways, I guess our pastor thought that the other team would look bad by themselves. So we just did our skit. People liked it, but I think our 2nd skit competition was probably the best received. Still, it is a challenge to get a tired group laughing in the morning, so SUCCESS! We still got a prize too. Anyways, I think there are alot of funny people in our group, but for some reason they don't want to compete. I can think of a few guys who could give us some good competition. At this point, we've established ourselves pretty well. What's fun about that is you can create your own humor and force it on your audience and they laugh, ha ha. I hear UCLA skit team is having a bit of trouble this year. That's too bad, although I didn't always write winners either. You learn by failure in this game.

Anyways, completely random and off-topic. Check out the states and European countries I've visited. I only count the countries in Europe I've visited since I started traveling at age 25. Anything before age 2 doesn't count mainly because I can't remember which countries those are. Although I did count Scotland because I was born there. Anyways, if you want to do something like this on your blog, go to World66.com.



create your own visited states map



create your own visited european countries map