going to see the black & gold

it's official: i'm going to see the Steelers play the Cardinals tomorrow!

i'm excited as a little school girl. I lived in Pittsburgh for 22 years and never got to see them play a regular season game in person. and now the time has come.

tomorrow should be a good game seeing as how the Cardinals head coach and offensive coordinator are former Pittsburgh coaches who each wanted to take Coach Cowher's place last year.


i'll probably have to tame down my excitement - seeing as how I'll be in enemy territory. the guy who sold us the tickets said their whole section will mostly be Arizona fans.

dear jesus, please don't let me get a black eye and beer poured on me at the game tomorrow.... in your name, amen.

back in phx

i've been in phoenix working again for the past week. we had just moved into our house - gotten our new bed, our internet and cable were finally up and running, and our counter tops were just being installed when... I had to leave again!

getting a lot done here though. writing some new songs on my backpacker. and getting to hang out with some AZ friends.

it's crazy how much you realize the value of your seemingly surface-friends once you move away. my buddy here in phoenix (co-worker) has been amazingly giving - he lets me stay at his house for free every time I come back to work my two-week stretches.

and I feel closer than ever to my old bandmates, tim & jonathan (see a video of them here). last night we went to chino bandido (yummm) and had a blast catching up and talking about the old times gigging around arizona.

i've got another 6 days for this little jaunt to be over. i miss jodi and boston like mad. and I just want to get home and sleep in my bed!

but my goal before I leave is to finish two songs I've been working on - even if they end up crappy songs - I'll be happy just to finish them. who knows, maybe you'll hear them someday. while you wait, here's another video to watch. I've titled this video: "OUCH!"

riches to rags (sorta)

so they just made an announcement at my job here in phoenix that we're all about to get raises. decent raises. that is, the job where I've just given my notice to resign.

it's a weird deal, the pay scale for healthcare in the southwest. what i do isn't much different from what I'd do at an emergency department pretty much anywhere in the US. but somehow, what started as a little higher pay 4 years ago has ended up in a *much higher* pay right now.

as the pay increases came, we (jodi and I) decided it would be best for our family and our ministry to just work fewer hours and try to make the same total income. and it worked. i was down to 30 hours or less every week - and living quite comfortably. i could lead worship as often as I wanted and still have time for vacation and the family.

so after a cross-country move, in an attempt to pursue what's best for our family and our ministry in NC, I find myself getting ready to work for nearly half what i'm being offered here in phoenix. and I'll have to work full time again! (i know, poor wahba - working 40-50 hrs a week like every other respectable person on the planet - he got raises while the economy of the rest of the country went to pot - poor, poor wahba).

i'd be lying if I didn't say it's tempting to keep my job here. my mind races to think of ways to keep working here, and working in Raleigh, and leading worship, and being a decent father/husband....

i guess the pious churchy answer is that Providence probably has more blessings for me once I begin work in Raleigh.

maybe not ones that affect our bottom line though.

wait and see. have faith. trust. that's all I've got. oh yeah, and an incredible wife and kid waiting at HOME for me. see you soon guys....

we're in!

good news: we're finally living in our house!

after months of living in our dear friends' basement (while still paying the mortgage on our new home), we've moved in.

still need some essentials - dishwasher, kitchen sink, countertops, a lot of paint. but it's definitely live-able.

so if you're in the area, please stop by. we'll fire up the barbie and watch some Baby Einstein on the gi-normous plasma....

new MP3 site - that doesn't start with i

so a pastor friend referred me to this website, mp3sparks.com - formerly AllOfMP3.com. i guess it's a russian site that allows you to purchase mp3s at a great price. here are the good and the bad:

hangups
-way-big learning curve for downloading. very tedious - pick the songs, put them in your basket, pick which kind of encoding and download each song one-by-one. then click and drag them into itunes music library. and if you're OCD like myself, you have to re-assign the music genre because they're all tagged with "blues" as the genre for some reason.
-awkward payment. you have to pre-pay a minimum onto your account, and are then charged as you download songs.
-limited and late releases. this site doesn't have everything. only one album by Passion, for example (though I did download some Radio-era Run DMC, some 70's David Bowie and some of Timbaland's new album). and new releases can take about 2-3 weeks to show up for download.

bonuses
-it's cheep! i downloaded about 180 mp3s (seriously) and still have a few cents left on my $25 initial deposit.
-encoding rate selection - i know, this was part of my criticism. but you can select the quality of encoding for your mp3 or aif file.
-it's legal. really. read for yourself.
-it's not itunes. share, burn and copy to as many machines as you like.
-it's not limewire. no viruses. no files that become static after the first 30 seconds

overall
i spent some time this week downloading songs and I'm impressed. it takes longer than itunes to download the songs, load them into itunes and re-genre them. but to be honest, it takes less time than Kazaa, Limewire or Soulseek because you don't have to weed through all the dirty files. and it's so cheap. give it a try. www.mp3sparks.com.

going home

sitting in the phoenix sky harbor airport right now. and boy am I glad to be going home.
it's been a long two weeks. a few personal successes and a few failures. a few drinks with good friends. and a LOT of work hours clocked in.

jodi and i figured out that by the time this whole phoenix-raleigh deal is done, I will have missed her birthday, my birthday, two national holidays (including turkey day) and 3 months of my son's life.

but there's good news. the end is in sight....

it's official: I have a job in NC! if all paperwork goes through - and believe me, there are stacks of it - i'll be starting work at my old job by early december. lots of prayers and airport blogs between now and then....