Phobophobia

 I was working on some trivia for tomorrow night for Camille's small group.  Joey and I had a Zoom meeting with her today, and she's still sick.  Yet she still hosts the small group night, and Madison won't miss it.  I've been helping out from time to time, and tomorrow night I was able to make her a quick game that goes somewhat the new series she and Lauren are doing on Psalm 23.  "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of darkness..."  The trivia game is a list of phobias, like photophobia.  That's a fear of phobias.  I'm not sure what that is exactly, as it seems fairly redundant.  I read it as if someone is fearful of fears?  Scared of being scared, perhaps?

Today was a good deal of filming, first with a crazy snowball fight that featured me dressed as a yeti, plus another guy dressed as Olaf the snowman.  It was wild!  The end result shows up on KPTV this weekend, an exclusive KidPak service that you can only see online. It's free, of course, but it's just something that we make available for our online viewers from all over.  Some can't come to see us in person, so we made the decision some time ago to keep this aspect of our ministry going.  Now we have additional things to create, but we've handled it well thus far.

I also leant my voice to a animated KidPak cartoon for the next weekend, one that should be pretty fun.  It was a busy day, with meetings and so on.  I was also with Joey and Camille this morning to write the skits for this weekend at other campuses, but just on Zoom.  We wrote out a skit though, something I've been doing lately for the other campuses, now numbered six.  We have seven total campuses again, plus the online campus, so really eight in a way.  But I send out material to everyone to let them know what's coming and other possible ideas.

Madison had taekwondo again tonight, and the countdown is on until the black belt.  Nana wasn't feeling well today, so she stayed back this time with Mom.  The two of them made a nice cozy fire in the fireplace to come home to.  But while there, Madison was sparring with friends and training hard as always.  She's on track, focused, and having a great time along the way.  A new restaurant with food themed from the Dominican Republic opened up at the end of that little strip mall, so we got some fruit smoothies from down there.  I was sipping on a mango smoothie as I watched Madison train with her form, and then do some further self-defense techniques.

We got home and tonight's movie was "Christopher Robin," which we saw some time ago in the theater.  It's a good one, and it's therapeutic in a way, a nice message movie that doesn't hit you over the head, but rather convicts you only as gently as Winnie the Pooh can.  Nana was feeling better by this point, and she sat with me to watch.  It was a nice visit to Great Britain, which of course was one of the reasons I picked the movie - we're trying to go to places she loves, if not in person, then in movies or stories.

Speaking of going places, I have a new love, something new that I'm quite happy to be doing.  By necessity, I have to get this heart muscle of mine working a little stronger, and also keep the circulation going better.  That being said, we have a treadmill that I've been doing for a bit, and as you might suspect, it's fairly boring on it's own.  There's a clock there, and I do a fairly brisk-paced walk there on my own.  The clock reminds me of how long I have to go, which drags on and on.  Sometimes while walking, I've been praying or thinking out things like our upcoming scripts or messages.  Anyway, I discovered something to help pass the time on this treadmill, and that is a massive collection of online point of view videos that people film of themselves walking throughout these famous locations throughout the world.  This morning, I spent about a half-hour walking through the Alps.  It sort of satisfies my curiosity of travel, and I love to walk, and it doesn't rush by with a slide show or even a car ride.  You just keep walking through these places, and I'm so excited in the coming days to be able to exercise and go places, without really going anywhere at all.  

Which brings to mind the "not going anywhere at all" part of the conversation.  The car bill was ginormous, what with leaks and regular updates.  The encouraging things that help counter this are the facts that the car is paid for, and that we've basically used up about two or three of the last car payments to fix things up.  Another thought:  we don't have much more to go as far as updates.  It's several hundred dollars worth of adjustments and updates to go, but we can space that out over the year.  Finally, we got our stimulus check in the mail.  It helps.  

Tonight we read from Esther, and we read from "Scoundrels" too.  We prayed for healing for our bodies, for our friends, and that someone in the federal government would actually look up what the word "unifying" actually means.  After Madison hid the groundhog in a surprise location as always, she was off to sleep, as we were.  I'm getting tired in the evening again, and that's a good thing!