Chris​Hubbs​.com

• I’m glad I signed up for the 0530 kickboxing class, but it’d really help if I’d go to bed earlier at night. Short sleep + workouts = ouch.
• Also = zzzzzz. The folks at the coffee stand know my order (large Americano) now and have it going when I walk up.
• Not so great: realizing 45 minutes in that what you thought was a one-hour Webex meeting is actually a two-hour Webex meeting.
• Better: having said two-hour Webex meeting only take an hour.
• My diet that’s supposed to be accompanying my kickboxing class isn’t helped when my wife buys two-pound cinnamon rolls from the local bakery.
• I’ve been busy enough lately that I started drafting this on Tuesday morning and just finally published it on Wednesday afternoon.
• On balance, I’m not really complaining about the cinnamon roll.

• After traveling two out of the last three weeks for work, it’s good to be home.
• It’s been really fun having football season start up this past few weeks, but now that the MLB playoffs are starting I’m likely gonna ignore football as long as the Cubs are still in it.
• There is a huge amount of Cubs gear for sale in all the stores around here.
• I’ve been saying that my goal is to not buy another piece of Cubs gear until I can buy one that says “World Series Champions”. Here’s hoping that means I’ll get to buy some before too many more weeks/years go by.
• Please don’t jinx it please don’t jinx it please don’t jinx it #GoCubsGo
• On reflection, it’s been an odd year for me music-wise: I don’t think I’ve bought an album or really sunk my teeth into anything new all year. The last record I bought and really fell in love with was the Hamilton Original Broadway Cast recording last fall.
• Hamilton. Chicago. March. Can’t wait.
• It’s possible that part of my reason for buying less music is that I’ve had a Spotify subscription this year. I don’t listen to it a ton, but it’s great for taking a listen to some new album w/o having to go purchase it or just listen to 30-second samples first.
• Can we just get done with the election already? The presidential candidates have been in Iowa since at least August 2015. This is far too long.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I’m in Florida for a work trip this week. It’s been a good time so far. Doesn’t hurt when the view out your conference room window looks like this:

But without further ado, the bullets:

• Rental car for this week: Chevy Camaro convertible with about 3000 miles on it. As usual with sports cars, it doesn’t have the visibility I’m used to in my old Saturn and my minivan.
• Amending the previous statement: if you put the top down, the visibility is pretty darn good.
• How can you tell the Midwestern boy visiting Florida: it’s the coldest week of the winter here (highs only in the low 60s!) and I’m driving around with the top down.
• I’ve been a long-time Tweetbot user but I’ve been fooling around with the official Twitter app on my phone the past few days. It’s interesting to evaluate the design choices. All the ads, sorry, “sponsored tweets” in the official app are sure annoying, though.
• Last year when I came to this committee meeting, Atlanta got their big ice storm and it took me three extra days to get home. Glad that this year the storm went much further north and won’t interfere with getting home.
• Watched Guardians of the Galaxy on the way down here. Not sure it was what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it a lot. The plot seemed far less important than the characters, and I really liked the characters. Merits a second watching.
• Then watched The Maze Runner the other night. That was 90 minutes I’ll never get back.
• I picked up a $199 Samsung Chromebook right before this trip. I’m reasonably impressed. Cheap hardware, but still functions pretty well. Will be curious to see how it holds up as I use it more.

Enough for now.

I’m on business travel this week to San Diego and with so many thoughts rattling around in my head, bullet points might be as good as it gets for now.

• There’s been a long-time West Coast - East Coast argument among my friends related to burger joints: In-N-Out vs. Five Guys. I like Five Guys, and today made my first trip to In-N-Out. It was fine, but it’s no Five Guys.
• I had more response on Twitter and Facebook to my burger joint comments than I’ve had on any post for months. Apparently I have a lot of friends who have very strong opinions about burger joints.
• It’s been a burger-heavy trip; I ate at Hodad’s at a friend’s recommendation on Monday night. It was also pretty tasty.
• I love the SoCal weather but can’t imagine living here. The traffic. :shudder:

Some thoughts unrelated to my location this week, in decreasing levels of significance:

• Ferguson, Missouri. So sad. So much pent-up history rearing its head the past week or two.
• Everywhere else in the world: apparently also falling apart. Come quickly Lord Jesus.
• I have a long post about death rattling around in my head but no time or will to write it right now.
• I’ve found precious little interesting new music this year, but the eponymous debut record by the band Colony House is a winner.
• I won (well, shared) the “Special K” award in our church softball league this season: the award for the most strikeouts. I think I had two.

Just a few random observations…

• Crazy softball game in our church league last night. We were behind 3-0 most of the night, then with two outs in the bottom of the 5th inning we scored 13 runs to invoke the mercy rule. Wild.
• I finally got my iPhone back from Apple after I sent it in to get the lock button replaced. Or at least I got an iPhone back. I didn’t record serial numbers, but the device ID reported by my work’s network is different, and it’s missing the little scratch on the screen. I’m not complaining - it’s basically a like-new iPhone 5, 18 months after I originally purchased it.
• Curious what the iPhone 6 will turn out to be and whether it’ll be enough to tempt me into an upgrade. If they have a larger device and I can get a decent price for my old iPhone, that might be enough… otherwise I can always wait for the inevitable iPhone 6S.
• I thought I lost my Fitbit somewhere going through security on the way home from my business trip last week. Was thinking it’d be a good excuse to need to check out the next round of wearable devices undoubtedly coming out this fall. Ends up I found it this morning in an obscure corner of my backpack. Oh well.
• Looking forward to meeting another “internet friend” in person tomorrow. I’ve met a couple dozen folks over the past decade who started out as “internet friends”, and they’ve been pretty consistently awesome. I have no doubt this next one will be, too.
• I’m feeling really tired this morning. I have a few vacation days scheduled over the next couple weeks, which should help. I need to schedule a few more. Things just don’t slow down.

It’s Thursday at nearly 7 pm and I’m on the next-to-last day of a quick business trip to France. This is my first visit to France, so my bullet point format seems useful for sharing a few assorted observations after a few days here.

• Jet lag is aggravated by shifted working hours. At home, I’m an early bird. Up before 5 am, at work before 7, home by 4, asleep by 10. Here work starts around 9, and dinner doesn’t start until at least 8. Last night’s dinner with customers started at 8:45 pm and ended just after midnight. Yummy food, but tough in the morning.
• I think I could spend a full day exploring the Amsterdam airport before I really got bored. The place is huge. Unfortunately I only have 65-minute layovers there both directions.
• For business hours being so late, all the shopping around here apparently closes at 5pm sharp. Makes it hard to shop for the family when I’m not here for a weekend. (Sorry in advance, family.)
• If I were coming here very often, I would need to learn some French.
• The food has been really good. I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
• I’ll probably set 3 alarms tonight to make sure that I wake up in time to catch my 6 am flight.
• I know I’m bigger than the average human, but it’s still a little unnerving when every toilet I sit down on gives off ominous creaking noises as if it were going to fall off the wall.
• That last bullet probably gave you an unpleasant mental image. Sorry.
• OK, if I were really sorry I would’ve deleted that bullet.

Tomorrow morning at 6am I leave Toulouse. TLS -> AMS -> ATL -> CID and Lord willing I’m home by 4 pm Central time. That’s a long day, but with a happy end.

Because hey, I haven’t done one of these on a Thursday for a while.

• It’s been kinda quiet at work this week. Certainly that won’t last.
• Looks like I’m going to make my first trip to Europe in a couple of weeks for some work meetings. Gonna be a lot of flying for two days of work, but it’ll at least cement my frequent flyer status for another year.
• With the cold wet weather all week I have this suspicion we’re gonna go from pseudo-winter to summer without a decent stretch of spring in between. Which is kind of a bummer. I like spring.
• I’m not sure what it is about Stephen Hough’s playing, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every record of his that I’ve gotten so far. (I got his new one, “In the Night”, this week. Hyperion has the digital downloads available a couple weeks before the CD drops.) My favorite is still his recording of Rachmaninov’s second concerto, though.
• I’m annoyed that Home Sharing doesn’t work well on iOS7. I wanted to listen to that new Stephen Hough record on my phone in my bedroom last night, and should’ve been able to just hook up to home sharing from my iTunes library on my iMac. However, it stalls out about 80% of the way through the loading process and never actually works. Sounds like it’s a known problem since iOS 5 or so.
• Even with that and a few other gripes with iOS, I have a hard time believing I could be inclined to get some Android phone instead of an iPhone 6 next time I need a phone.
• This fall will be the first time in nearly 15 years of owning a cell phone that I won’t be champing at the bit for my 2-year contract to come up so I can get a new phone because I’m so unhappy with my old one. (I may be champing at the bit if the iPhone 6 is particularly awesome, though. I’d love a bigger screen, and to get a 32GB model instead of the 16GB iPhone 5 I have now.)

Well, that ended up more tech-oriented than I thought it would. Sorry. That’s what you get for random bullet points.

Because hey, I like this format.

• Just when you think spring was here, we get snow. The ground and roads were covered this morning. Ick. At least it’s melted off by this afternoon.
• There’s a 60 degree day in the forecast. I’ll believe it when I see it.
• Of course, next week I’ll be in Florida for work where the highs are supposed to be in the low 80’s every day.
• You aren’t reading this just to get Chris’s thoughts on the weather, are you?
• I just submitted a big proposal at work this afternoon. Praying that it is looked upon favorably.
• I desperately need some other music to get rid of the Frozen soundtrack earworm that’s plagued me the past week. The girls have been singing “Do you want to build a snowman?” incessantly.
• I did something this morning I haven’t done in ages - turned off my alarm w/o realizing it and overslept past something on my calendar, in this case my Tuesday morning Bible study. Oops.
• I have fresh brownies on the stove and a chapter of The Hobbit to read to the girls, so this will be my last bullet.

Because, hey, it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these.

• Did my first three-service weekend on worship team the last two days. I think I made the right decision to go to only one week per month.
• The worship set, albeit short, was a good one.
• Did a special number with a friend and it turned out really well.
• Have come to happy acceptance of the fact that I’ll never really be a soloist, but I can be a darn good backup singer. That works for me.
• Work has recently given me a case of ‘be careful what you wish for because you might just get it’. More to follow, but it’ll be an interesting next few months.
• We’re right in the middle of birthday week at the Hubbs house. Two birthdays down, one to go. Being 37 doesn’t make me feel nearly as old as having my youngest daughter turn 5 does.
• After griping that I missed Markdown support in my move back to Wordpress, my friend Randy pointed out that Wordpress added Markdown support via the Jetpack plugin a few months back. Huzzah!
• I’ve got a lot of thoughts brewing on the recent developments re: Bill Gothard and Mark Driscoll, but nothing really that feels solid enough or useful enough to be worth posting. Praying for all concerned.

Such are my scattered thoughts for Monday.