Wow…the last number of weeks have completely flown by in an amazing way! I hope & pray everyone in blogville is doing well; I have some reading to catch up on around here. I look forward to spending some time reading posts and catching up a bit after being gone from blogville for a while. To give an update on what’s new with me since my last post:

The Music
Unity 2006 was awesome! We were there for the entire concert weekend except for arriving a little late on Saturday since we were a bit tired. We wanted to get good seats for the Thursday and Friday bands, so we setup our chairs in line between 6:00am and 7:00am on those two mornings. I’ll admit we didn’t stay there all day with our chairs. There were a lot of people that didn’t, but thankfully the people who stayed were forgiving. Apparently, if you leave your chairs in line at the Summer Celebration and take off for the day, your chairs end up thrown in the woods/weeds with no sign of your place in line. We would show up about an hour before the gates opened again, and everyone was really cool. Again, we weren’t the only ones that took off though.

The bands were great. Lincoln Brewster was awesome; if you haven’t heard his stuff, check him out. Also, Aaron Shust was surprisingly good as well. The Newsboys never cease to amaze me! They put on an incredible concert; musically and with their stage setup and many special effects which included huge confetti machines and their hydraulic drum stage! …and did I mention musically, they are unbelievable live! And to top all of that off, Peter Furler spent about 10-20 minutes basically talking about God and Christianity in a way which, quite honestly, made me want to get saved all over again. The audience was really engaged. It was totally silent during the time Peter was speaking. He gave the opportunity for people to receive Christ and the response was great! I walked away realizing that their entire show was nothing less than miraculous in every way.

There is a lot of really great stuff for the kids in the huge kid’s area too; everything from clowns, kid’s music stage, inflatables, etc. Plus, the food at the festival is really affordable to you don’t have to spend a fortune to eat. Many people believe, myself included, that the Unity Christian Music Festival is kind of what heaven will be like in many ways. There are so many cool people and families there, and the love of Christ is everywhere at the festival.

The Kids
My son had his first sleepover party a couple of weeks ago. He had three of his best friends over and we went to the Double JJ rodeo on Friday night (which was way cooler than I thought it would be) and then went apple and peach picking on Saturday morning at Vince Brown Farms. Actually, it’s been bough by another family, but I can’t remember the new name off hand. That’s a fun place to go if you enjoy that kind of thing. They take you on a tractor wagon ride out into the orchards.

The boys wanted to sleep in the basement by themselves, which was fine with me because I was exhausted and wanted to get a good nights sleep. I encouraged them to do the same, but being their first sleepover, that wasn’t going to happen. Around midnight, they looked tired enough to puke, but they seemed determined to stay up late. I was abruptly awaken by the breathing sound and voice of a Darth Vador toy at 1:30am. When I managed to make my way over to my son’s room next door, the boys had already ran downstairs and Darth Vador was sitting on the floor flashing his light saber all by himself. I figured this to be a cruel joke to a tired dad, but quickly learned to sleep through the sound of Darth’s breathing equipment and claims that Luke must come over to the dark side. I found out the next morning, that they weren’t messing with me at all, they were freaking themselves out by turning him on in the dark room, then getting scared by him and running back downstairs.

Work
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working a bunch. I’m a technology manager for a manufacturing company in Grand Haven called M&S Companies. We have three facilities in Grand Haven. Essentially, M&S is a steel tube fabricating company. We put holes in tube that ends up in retail displays and highway signs mostly. We also do some of the welding of the frame assemblies. Next time you are in a grocery or department store, look at the tubes where the shelves and brackets go into on the displays and shelves. There’s a good chance those tubes came from us. :) And yes….Amstore is one of our major customers! We do the tubing portion of many of their display systems, many of which end up in Kohl’s stores.

Anyway, I’m the techno-geek around the place, which means I’m responsible for all of the company technology other than the machine controls in the plant. From the hardware perspective, this includes the servers, network, all user workstations, printers, copiers, phone systems, PDA’s, digital cameras, cellphones, multi-media projectors, XM radio system, Time Clocks, and the list goes on…..

From the software side, my first and most important responsibility is our corporate software ERP packaged called Vista. This is the software we use throughout our company including customer quotes, orders, work orders, scheduling, invoicing, etc. I purchased this software for the company 8 years ago and continue to be the “local Vista expert”. I’m also the go-to guy for any questions about Microsoft Office (Work, Excel, Outlook), Windows, our payroll software, etc.

I farm some of the stuff out to a couple of key Vendors; that which needs the extremely focused expertise of the nutty professors. This includes my Network and Server setups, and my phones systems. These two areas require extremely focused technical skill that I neither posses nor desire! I consult with them on these technologies, make the necessary business and infrastructure decisions, then hire these experts to configure things, leaving the day-to-day administration up to me after they are complete.

We needed to upgrade our entire server and network setup recently, which is why I’ve been spending so much time at work. This was a necessary and past-due step due to our very rapid company growth and it also laid the groundwork for our next Vista upgrade, which I have to do next. Thank God though, that the Vista upgrade will be much more enjoyable for me than the hardware end was. I really enjoy the software / applications side of what I do much more than the computer network hardware. I’m glad the hardware part is done, although my Vendor did much of the initial work, I had to do a lot of planning, and a lot of follow-up for a few weeks to get things tweaked in. My phones and voicemail have been blowing up with the after-effects of a huge network upgrade and are only now finally slowing down! I really needed some time off, which is why my boss(es) decided to graciously give me the Friday of Memorial day weekend off (giving me a 4-day weekend) and giving me a nice cash bonus to take my family away for the weekend. We ended up going to Chicago and had one of the best weekend’s we have ever had! God is sooo good!! It was a last-minute and somewhat rushed decision, but God worked it all out in a miraculous way. It was incredible; our hotel location, the weather, everything we got to do, the timing of everywhere we went just worked out perfectly each day. I could go on and on. To top it all off, I got to do a little night photography one night too :) as you can see from the above photo!

Well, this post is already too long, so I’m going to stop now. I may elaborate on the Chicago trip later since it was sooo fun! In the meantime, I have tons of new pics of our vacation, sleepover, etc on my Flickr page here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oakcrestfamilies/sets/845452/