For the last 2 months I’ve been in school learning to teach English as a second language. I hope this will be something I can use in Chicago and in SE Asia. It’ been a lot of fun and I’ve learned a lot about teaching, both English and otherwise.
As part of the class we occasionally watch videos. Here are a few that have causes a lot of laughs.
Autumn helps daddy open his Dice Tower Secret Santa Gift.
You know we like to play games. Playing board games has increasingly become a social outlet for us ever since Eric McLaughlin introduced us to Catan in 2002. We have become good friends with a number of people at the table playing games. In Hawaii our main social outlet outside of the church has been in a board game club.
So it makes sense that we played a lot of games this year, 405 to be exact. 86 of those were children’s games we played with Autumn.
Many of the games we played this year were new to us. In total we played 47 games new games. Many of those we only played once at our gaming group and will likely never play again. It isn’t that they were bad. We just don’t own them. We own all of our most played games, which you can see below.
One funny development this year has been Autumn’s interest in “daddy’s games.” Whenever we get a new game, which is every few months, she wants to play the game. What that means is she wants to help punch out the cardboard pieces. She is always disappointed the next day when she can’t punch out the game again.
Below are a few quick lists I made of the games that we played in 2011.
| Most Played Games Quarriors! (21) Forbidden Island (16) Dominion (15) Alien Frontiers (9) Race for the Galaxy (9) Mr. Jack in NY (7) Word on the Street (7) Blokus (6) Defenders of the Realm (6) Ghost Stories (6) Samurai (6)
|
Games I Wish I’d Played More Cyclades Galaxy Trucker No Thanks! Agricola Power Grid Steam |
| Favorite New Games Quarriors Descent Alien Frontiers King of Tokyo War of the Ring |
Games I Won’t Regret Never Playing Again Star Trek Expeditions Kill Dr. Lucky Nuns on the Run Funny Friends |
A few weeks ago I was taking a shower. I started thinking about my Christmas Eve sermon. For those of you that don’t realize it, Christmas Eve is like the Super Bowl for preachers. You have the biggest crowd of the year. It is time to bring your A game. You pull out all your preaching tools to craft a humorous, yet meaningful sermon. It is also a hard time to preach because everyone knows your playbook. They’ve heard as many Christmas sermons as years they’ve been alive. How do you say something novel without saying something untrue?
I was thinking about the time Thomas McKenzie used Metallica’s song “One” as his Christmas sermon illustration when I had an interesting thought. “I wonder if there is a way for me to talk about the zombie apocalypse in my Christmas sermon?” After a couple of minutes of thinking I had some bare bones ideas I could work with.
Over the next few weeks I kept thinking. But after I posted to Facebook what I was doing I knew it really needed to be good. I worked more on this sermon than I have worked on a sermon in a long time. Not only would this be the last sermon I preached to many of the people in either of my congregations, it was also for my (miniscule) internet audience (namely my parents).
Last night I preached it twice. And I recorded it. I’ll say up front I was happier with the second time, both in my delivery and the response of the congregation. There are always slight differences when I preach the same sermon and I changed a couple of things in between. However, if you choose to listen you will hear the first attempt, which I was still happy with.
Why would I want to talk about zombies on Christmas? First, it was a lot of fun to prepare and preach. Second, it got people’s attention. Third, zombies were a fun bridge to talk about standard Jesus stuff (incarnation, love, salvation, etc). I just wish I could talk about zombies more often.
I recently decided to vote in the Dice Tower’s People’s Choice Top 100 Board Games. Since we’ve played around 100 different board games in the last couple of years I had to decide what my top 20 games were in order to vote. And since I was at it, Teresa made a list as well.
Here they are side by side for comparison. Our criteria are a mixture of how interested we are to play these games right now, how much fun we have had playing them in the past, and whether we want to play them again.
| Clayton | Teresa |
20. Power Grid |
20. Mr. Jack in NY |
19. Memoir ’44 |
19. Agricola |
| 18. Agricola |
18. Evo |
17. Ticket to Ride |
17. Blue Moon City |
16. Carcassonne |
16. Chaos in the Old World |
15. Samurai |
15. Small World |
14. Forbidden Island |
14. Galaxy Trucker |
13.Dixit |
13. Tikal |
12. Steam |
12. Ingenious |
11. Cyclades |
11. Descent |
| 10. Galaxy Trucker |
10. Race for the Galaxy |
9. No Thanks! |
9. Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas |
8. Arkham Horror |
8. Dominion |
| 7. Descent |
7. Forbidden Island |
| 6. Dominion |
6. Defenders of the Realm |
| 5. Race for the Galaxy |
5. Cyclades |
4. Ghost Stories |
4. Arkham Horror |
| 3. Defenders of the Realm |
3. Ghost Stories |
2. Alien Frontiers |
2. Alien Frontiers |
1. Quarriors |
1. Quarriors |