Thursday, August 28, 2008

Season Ticket Day 2008


From previous posts, you know that we are football people.  Not just football people, Trojan football people.  The Clark family bleeds cardinal.  Every Saturday during the fall you will find us either in front of the TV or in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum watching USC play. We root for our team and whomever is beating UCLA.  You also know that we are very traditional and in this area, tradition is strong.

It starts with season ticket day.  That special day when we arrive home to see the overnight delivery package on our doorstep.  Slowly we rip open the envelope wondering what this years season tickets will look like and where we will be sitting.  This year, we will be sitting in section 14, row 86.  The tickets, well, they look like victory!

When game day arrives, we gear up in our cardinal and gold and load the car.  We head for breakfast at The Pantry in downtown Los Angeles where we dine in a sea of USC football fans.  After breakfast we head to campus, Heritage Hall to be specific.  For my UCLA friends, that's where we keep all of the National Championship and Heisman trophies.  Yes, we need a building for all of them.  We meet my friends, the Freemans at Heritage Hall 2 hours before game time for band warm up and the halftime show run through.  It is moving when the band echos throughout the campus halls as they begin to play "Fight On" and "Conquest."  As the band marches to the alumni quad, we head for the Colesium, the band will catch up and overtake us with the drum cadence pounding.  We follow the band off campus, kicking the lucky flagpole as we go and march ourselves to the stadium.  Once in our seats, we await the bands march to the field and the sound of the "Pre-game Sequence" followed by the "Star Spangled Banner."  The kick-off comes, game on!  When the game is won, we head to the student section for the final band concert, our car and dinner.

We love USC football.  Go Trojans and Fight On!


What a blessing!


It has been an extremely blessed summer for me.  If you have followed my blog, you have watched as for the last five weeks, I have been able to jump around the U.S. doing some fun things.  That is because I am a very blessed man.  I have worked at the First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton for almost nine years now.  I love my job!  It is of course not without its challenges, but I love getting up and going to work and those whom I work with.  As a matter of fact, I have missed my friends for the last five weeks as I have been on sabbatical.  The church has blessed me with five weeks off in which to rest and refresh.  Thank you to our elders for this wonderful gift.

My sabbatical has consisted of a trip to New York, a week camping and surfing in San Diego, scuba diving in Catalina, taking the GRE, a trip to Las Vegas and time with my family.  There has been a lot of reading, reflecting and just hanging out with friends and family. 

Most of the pictures of my time off are already posted on this blog.  Here is a last couple of pics as I get ready to head back to work.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Dive Buddies




In 2005, I was trying to finish college by any means possible.  Well not really by any means, but when you are down to needing only a few units to graduate you start to get creative.  I found myself needing one unit of P.E.  21 years after graduating high school, taking a PE class seemed pretty silly but what are you going to do?  After some research, I found out that something I have always wanted to do, scuba diving, could get me the unit I needed.  So, off to dive class I went.  Megan, then only 12 years old, also loves the water and I was able to talk her into going along.

Megan is the best dive buddy ever!  In class, we learned how to handle every mis-step you can have when diving.  Megan almost drowned me during buddy breathing regulator passing.  She got hit by a rogue wave and lay floundering in the surf at Laguna.  Her tank came off in Catalina.  We have had a lot of laughs.  Watching her try and get a wetsuit on is pretty hilarious too (sorry Megan, I am laughing at you not with you here).  Believe it or not, they actually gave us certification cards.  We actually did pretty well. Megan being only 12 was amazing!

Now even though we don't get a chance to dive very often, we love to dive. On almost any vacation, you will find us underwater at some point. I have dove Cozumel, Maui, Catalina, Shaw's Cove (Laguna Beach) and my favorite, The Big Island of Hawaii.  We hope next year brings diving in Grand Cayman.

The picture is from this past weekend when Meg and I dove off Catalina Island at "Sea Fan Grotto" and "Dynamite Shack".  The diving was only fair.  We saw lots of kelp, garibaldi, blue banded goby, sea stars and urchins and even a very nice lobster.  We had a lot of fun.  No mis-haps this time.