The Peak youth group immediately after the 10-hour trip home.

Fishing the San Juan

Allright, so one of the days at camp, I went with Rick (youth pastor from Peak Community Church in Fort Collins, CO), Lee and Jana (Lee was the youth pastor from Immanuel here in Fort Collins and Jana is his wife), and Chad, Jesse and Daniel (all from Chris Tomlin's band -- well Chad drives their tricked-out tour bus).

So I didn't catch anything in spite of seeing about 10,000 fish and having the same flies as everyone else -- not even one strike. Turns out I should have had a small split shot sinker attached to my leader. Oh well, I've never fished nymphs before so I'll chalk it up to experience. All the other guys caught something. Jesse and Daniel ended up fishing redneck style trying to wrangle one that jumped the hook using Daniel's ball cap.

I had a great time in spite of no fish and the extreme heat. I got to know Jesse, Janet (Jesse's wife), Chad and Daniel a little on the drive to and from fishing. Definitely a cool group of folks.

Lee and Jana are leaving Fort Collins to start a church somewhere in the Rockies here in Colorado, which, judging by Lee's love of fly-fishing will be a pretty sweet deal for him.

Daniel and Jesse were going to return to the spot we fished a few days later with some other folks. I didn't hear how they ended up doing, but they were hiring a guide so I imagine they did pretty well.

Jesse Reeves on bass, Student Life Camp.

Daniel Carson on guitar, again Student Life Camp.

Chris Tomlin from Student Life Camp. My camera had a hard time in the low light, so this is about the only decent photo I got of him.

Student Life Camp photo -- family group -- SO I didn't post this as soon as I hoped I would. Hopefully folks will see and enjoy this!

back from camp

Well I went to Student Life Camp in Durango, Colorado over the past week and had an amazing time. I have a lot to post, including photos I promised to put here, which I will. Check back over the next few days to see updates to this post.

countdown to camp

Well I leave for camp in just over 12 hours.

I'm going to be driving one of two vans from our church.

I don't know any of the kids and I barely know the youth pastor and his wife.

I wanted to go just to be able to start serving again at Peak. When I was there before (pre-Chicago) I was the [volunteer] youth pastor for a few years. We've been back since last summer and really haven't started serving until last week when I sang on the worship team. I sang on the worship team again today and then we're going to start helping with the nursery on and off in a few weeks. I think we may undertake the college ministry starting this fall...

Well the camp is in Durango and is put on by Student Life. Chris Tomlin will be leading worship and Louie Giglio will be speaking. I'm actually fairly excited to be involved. I want to get to know some of the kids -- hopefully some of the graduating seniors will stay in town and can be part of the college ministry. There are lots of things I love about working with High School students, and camp is certainly a passion of mine.

random summer refreshment

I like iced tea. In my youth growing up in Georgia, sweetened iced tea was great.

Here in Colorado, as with most of the rest of the US, iced tea is not served sweetened, and to me the final product is lacking because of it.

Last summer, my friends Michael and Teri took me to an Asian area of Chicago (Near Broadway and Argyle -- it wasn't China Town, but there were all sorts of Asian markets and we ate Dim Sum at Furama, which I highly recommend). I tried Jasmine Tea for the first time and really enjoyed it. It was green tea with Jasmine flower petals in it and it had a very definite floral taste -- it was served hot.

I bought a tin of Jasmine Tea at one of the many cool markets there and it has sat undisturbed in our cupboard since then.

The other day I had a real hankerin' for sweet iced tea, but we don't have any black tea (the kind normally used to make iced tea) in the house. I called up Teri and asked her if Jasmine Tea was good iced and how I would go about making a batch (all the directions on the tin for brewing are in units of grams, which means little to me). She said that iced Jasmine Tea was good and that I could just make it in the coffee pot then ice it. She said to experiment with the amount of tea I used.

Well the first batch came out great, and the second was equally good. I thought I'd pass on my "recipe" for making sweet, iced Jasmine Tea.

• Use a 10-cup coffee maker.
• Use a rounded 1/3 cup of Jasmine Tea in the basket.
• While the tea is brewing, put 1 cup of sugar in a gallon pitcher.
• Once the tea is done brewing, pour the hot tea into the gallon pitcher and stir to dissolve the sugar (use a pitcher that would not break from the sudden addition of hot water)
  
• Fill the pitcher the remainder of the way with cold water.
• Serve tea over ice.

Some things to note:

Jasmine Tea can be either black or green tea. I have only tried green tea. I imaging black tea would taste great as well.

I like this tea sweetened. For those who like unsweetened tea, just leave out the sugar. You could also sweeten with honey or "sugar in the raw" (it seems to be raw cane sugar or something like that).

An alternate way to brew this would be to just put leaves right in the pitcher with a gallon of cold water and let it sit in the fridge. Teri recommended this method, saying that once the tea was too strong you could just remove the leaves from the pitcher.

I am going to try brewing a second batch of tea from the same tea leaves and see how it tastes. In theory you could brew several batches before it got weak or bitter.

If you try this and have any suggestions, leave a comment.

work, camp, life

Well things have been getting slow lately as far as work is concerned. I've added 2 clients this month, which is good, but the overall volume of work has been low and declining recently, which is not so good.

I volunteered a month or so ago to go to camp with our church youth ministry as a counsellor. That comes up next week. So from Monday through Friday I'll be gone at camp volunteering.

We had a fun 4th of July weekend. Saturday we had a whole bunch of folks over for a BBQ, which was pretty fun. I had spent all day Saturday cleaning up the yard from the past few wind storms and the yard looked great. Our guests started arriving around 4:30 and the sky started clouding up. I put up a picnic shelter, then the wind started gusting and the sky got really dark. For the next 30 minutes the wind tore at the shelter and the trees in the yard. We finally surrendered and pulled the shelter down and the wind stopped almost immediately, but not until a whole bunch of willow branches had been deposited all over the freshly groomed yard.

We had fun nonetheless, but it was a pretty crazy ordeal.

Yesterday (the 4th) we went to City Park here in Fort Collins and fished with Todd for a little while. Missy and their daughter Kara joined us and we had a small lunch picnic. It was absolutely perfect out. Lots of shade and a slightly cool breeze kept us all perfectly comfortable.

Last night we went to the fireworks display in Loveland, which was great as usual. The kids both really enjoyed it. I don't remember enjoying fireworks that much for a long time.

So now I'm faced with a short work week before being gone next week. Good and bad. Overall we feel very happy, though, I would say.