Here's the skinny

Hey everyone!

It has been quite a busy trip so far! Last week was intensely cool seeing over 100 teens accept salvation! The activities were fun and I got to talk about all sorts of things with all sorts of people!

I need to work on remembering names, though, because that's one of my fatal flaws. Luckily the campers were very forgiving.

Yesterday we finished our 18 hour trip from virginia to Missouri. We just got done with the church service/luncheon at High Street Baptist Church and are on our way back to unload the budget truck and set up for camp tomorrow!

Fun times ahead!
~Kyle

Quick Update

Aaaaaaw yeah.

We are pretty much rocking test camp.

Yesterday we got some serious CPR training done, and that was super fun times. We then went bowling as a group and that was a more real kind of fun. Meeting all the staff and getting to know all these fun people is pretty exciting for a phleg like myself.
(smooth transition)
We learned about our temperaments today! I'm still a phleg/Mel, so nothing I'm not used to. Right now we are on an hour long break before we head downstairs to get some sports training. I don't really know how that's gonna work since I pretty much already know the rules to all the major sports. I hope there is dodgeball. I like dodgeball. I like you, too. Bye.

Thanks for reading!
~Kyle

Greenhorns

What up, dogs?

... Sorry. I don't talk that way, but I sometimes have to take advantage of how casual this blog can be to remind myself to be less formal. Formality limits opinion.

So: Update: I landed safely yesterday and waited in the airport for around 4 hours (don't worry I ate Burger King and played Flick Home Run) until I met up with a friend, we'll call him Brad, and we got picked up along with two other staffers, we'll call them Joshua and Jasmine.

We arrived on campus, put our stuff in our dorms, and went to the very first orientation meeting/worship/blur-of-memory-because-everything-happened-so-fast. Then I fell asleep.

Next day (Today): Woke up, and had a cold shower which was pretty hard to do, but it sure woke me up. We all headed to the breakfast hall and ate, went to the worship, and tested out some games to have at camp. It was pretty much the bomb. We broke for lunch, and came back for a longer, but informative orientation.

We then broke for about an hour of free time during which I fixed up two computers to work with a very stubborn printer. That may not sound fun to you, but it was to me. Don't judge.

We then went to a lil' place called Mojitos and I got pork tacos which I found a bone in. They said it was a parsley stem, but none of us were buying it. So that was gross, but extremely funny. I got a sandwich after that.

Came back, had worship, celebrated an awesome lady's birthday, we'll call her Karen, and then had an intense and surprisingly hot night-time hide and seek game. Then after I got sweaty I took another cold showed. I loved it that time though.

Alright so: after writing all that, I will mention none of the meal times, free times, or really anything unless something out of the ordinary happened, or it caught my attention for some reason. Like that bone in the taco thing. I just wanted to give you the gist of things for now.

Thanks for reading!
~Kyle

P.S. We wore green shirts today and a lot of people are new here, including me if you count I've never done the American tour. That's why the title is that.

For real this time.

Hello, most faithful of readers!

It's been a while since I've done this so I figure the amount of readers has dwindled down to only the most dedicated of web surfers. Or the most bored of Facebook users. Either way welcome back! On to business.

Today I am flying to Louisville where I will start my first day on the Incredibly Awesome 20th Anniversary Lift Summer Tour Staff. I'm pretty sure that's the official name. As you might have been able to deduce: I'm pretty darn pumped about it.

I've been on the AirLift UK Staff for a few times now (and again this year), but I've always wanted to do the whole tour. Well the opportunity presented itself this year and I immediately took it. Of course, when I say 'immediately' I mean that it happened almost literally last minute. Was it stressful for me? Yes. I like planning ahead of time. However, it will be so worth it. I've heard tales of the staff summer tour for so long and I'm super excited to finally be a part of it. I'm looking forward to, in a very particular order, seeing what God does in and through my fellow staffers and the campers, having fun with said people, and the food.

"But, Kyle, why is food last on the list?" - Medium Rare Steak with a baked potato on the side

Don't worry, steak! You are still really good and I love almost all food (That almost is you, seafood), but you are just going to have to deal with being prioritized a little lower! Don't think I won't still see you often, though. Maybe not steaks, but food in general.

This got really off topic! My plane is taking off in about 36 minutes (at least that's what they say now), so I'm getting more excitable every minute. It might not help that my breakfast is haribo gummy bears. Don't get me wrong, they are good. They just aren't as healthy as you might think they sound. I'm actually going to see if I can't find a vending machine around here with sticky buns or something. That's better, right?

I'll be keeping this as updated as possible during this tour, so check back often. Check my twitter or instagram to see things more often, though. 140 characters or a picture takes much less time than this. Especially on a phone. Just search "KyleGoesPlaces"

Until next time,
~Kyle

Happy New Year!

Today is my birthday, or so facebook tells me. Aside from last year, this is usually when I make my "New Year's Resolution". This is due to the fact that, to me, it is a new year. I don't need to subscribe to the January first model due to my first year starting 22 years ago.

This is one of those years that doesn't really carry anything of much importance with it. In fact, as a boy, there aren't very many at all that carry any exceptional amount of weight. Off the top of my head I'd say the birthdays of manly importance are these:

10: You've lasted a decade and have a pretty good idea of who you want to be, or at the very least which color power ranger you'd most likely become.

16: You can drive now, so prepare yourself for all the ladies!!! Haha just kidding, they can drive, too.

18: You are now technically an adult. This one is important legally, so I'm kinda obligated to put it here. (Fun fact: I waited till now to get my license)

20: Two decades... This one actually threw me off just thinking about it... Two decades...

21: You can drink now. If you want. Fair warning, though: most alcohol tastes horrible. Like really really bad. It's honestly not worth it.

30: People start calling you an adult without hesitation or using air quotes

40: By now most people you know will use your title and last name, and kids will be freaked out when they find out you have a first name.

That continues on in that pattern (decades), but I won't bother you with all of them because I haven't actually done enough in depth studying of what it's like to be anything above 45, so I probably couldn't represent it that well.

As you can see, though, the rate of important birthdays drastically decreases after the mid-20's. It is a slightly less steep of a fall for women, but I'm not one of those, so that doesn't matter right now. It doesn't bother me too much that eventually birthdays won't matter nearly as much. To be honest, I'm not a big birthday kind of person.

I appreciate when people congratulate me on living as long as I have, despite the naysayers who thought that I wouldn't make it this far. Well, despite my early years of active impish-ness, I survived and have in the last 5 or 8 years moved on to a much more passive pranksterism.

So thank you for all of the birthday greetings that were given to me via the social media websites today, and the ones I was given in person! I will talk to some of you soon, some of you when I go Wales in the fall, and some of you I will hear from again next year when Facebook tells you it's my birthday again!

Don't worry, I love you all the same.

Thanks for reading!
~Kyle


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Right Off Memory Lane

Welcome back, readers! It took me longer than I thought it would to get used to drawing electronically, so this post has been a little delayed. But now I'm here, you're here, and we are all set to get this thing started. So let's get this thing started. As promised, I will be guiding you through my mind, so I think it's important that you first know what my mind looks like. So here is some clip art of a brain!

Now, I know that you might have been expecting some grand masterpiece of art by yours truly, but hopefully you'll learn to lower those expectations soon. That said, let's zoom in to the part we'll be look at today: The memory center. Which is right here-ish:

Zoom in a little.

Enhance.

Hmmm... What is that? Do some totally unrealistic cop drama enhancing.

Oh my goodness! It's the best theatre in my mind! I can't believe I had almost forgotten about it. This is the place to go for any citizen of my mind who wants, needs, or is forced to look through anything and everything that I have ever experienced in the past. It only has one screen, but with my patented UnrealD Glasses, that screen will show you the memory that you wanted to see while simultaneously projecting different memories to any number of audience members that may also be in the theatre with you. If you go in without any specific memory in mind, you'll receive a random one! Come on, let's give it a try.

Oh... Well. I DID say it would be random. Seems like a blast from the past. As you can see, the audience of this theatre is very opinionated, and will sometimes discuss memories as they watch them. That sort of thing is usually frowned upon in real life, but since all the audience members (along with every citizen in my mind) are personifications of aspects of myself divided into almost infinitesimally portioned archetypes. That's a topic for another post, though. The point is, they are all basically me, and I like my opinions, so they have no problem with sharing them or listening to them. However, like every theatre, there is a more sacred and everlasting area where they make their opinion more permanently known.

Here is where the people communicate most somewhat effectively. Every citizen is required to have an imaginary sharpie (imaginarpie) on them at all times just in case they need to correct or add to any statement written anywhere. Sure, it leads to some pretty messy paperwork now and then, but this is one of the places the law really proves it's worth. Just look at this monument to public opinionatedness. Look at it!

Well, that's about all of the theatre that I have time to show you today. I'll show you to another area of this thriving community some other time! Until then, remember to take some time out of your day to think of something different. It'll keep you sane.

Thanks for reading!

~Kyle

Fixer Upper

Now that I've calmed down a bit from the original withdrawals caused by the lack of this outlet, I think I can more accurately tell you what's going to go down here. Besides, this was on my list of things to do today. See?





Before I start, I want to tell you that I've redesigned the blog slightly to include videos (as seen near the title) and a new email sign up feature (in the right sidebar) for those of you who want to sign up for receiving an email every time I post. So let me know how those gadgets work out!

I've also committed myself to find or draw/film a picture/video for each post, since visual things just make it look better. I've already filled that quota for this post, but it's hard to find pic/vids that pertain to my odd subject matter. So chances are, it will mostly be completely custom stuff. However, I had to order a stylus to use on my iPad (P.S. I have one now) because otherwise the best types of drawings I can give you would all look like this.



I expect better of me, too, Crudely-Drawn Stickman. I expect better of me, too...

The stylus should come in a week or so, so I'll probably start posting "the good stuff" in about a week. I'll be spending that waiting time figuring out what else I could do to make this blog more "happening".

Thanks for reading!
~Kyle

But Don't Call it A Comeback!

It seems that after an entire year of posting to this blog daily, I've gone through a withdrawal of sorts. I have become far too used to sharing at least one stray thought with the anonymous masses of the internet. Now, however, there is a freedom in what I write about.

No longer am I constrained to the world of holidays. The mere fact that "Today is" weren't the first two words of this post have already made my mind joyously black-flip due to it's inability to even comprehend the freedom that comes fact that it is now able to release whatever it wants into this now un-fenced field of green, dewy grass just waiting to be stomped around in by the big, rubbery boots filled to overflowing by the unpredictably intermittent torrents of ideas rained down from the stormy clouds above until the grass is pushed down neatly into galosh-shaped prints and churned into new, fertilized soil in which new blades of sweet, green knowledge can grow.

YEAH! I didn't even bother to keep track of what was a metaphor for what in that long spiel, but I don't care because I wrote it out of WANT. I WANT to write about random things. Don't get me wrong, the holidays were fun, but now... Oh-ho-ho-ho NOW... Now you are ready.

Had I unleashed the unaltered, unabridged whirlwind of stupid that grows as slowly and surely in my mind as do stalactites in a cave, you would probably have not read ANY of it, and I wouldn't blame you. But thanks to my cunning ruse, you have been slowly given little hints of my personality. Sips of an all-too-strong blend that has, does, and will come off as a very haughty, rich, bitter drink. But thanks to those little sample cups, you now know how you like it. Maybe you can handle it, and you think "Hey I could take this daily and be just peachy." Or maybe you can't drink it straight, so you have to have to mix cream and sugar in it, so you only read one out of every few posts. That is fine by me!

All I know is that this is now officially mine. I have passed my self-imposed, and admittedly self-graded test of commitment. Now is the time for me to make this blog what it was always meant to be! A journey into my own mind and life! You who choose to read these posts as they are written will be able to experience this along with me, as honestly I have only vaguely mapped my inner machinations, and I think it only fair to warn you: Things are about to get weird.

As Always,

Thanks for reading!

~Kyle