Luke's New Journal

I've been thinking about this question: who do I want to be 10 years from now? My 30th birthday was a little over two months ago, and I don't feel very much more mature than I did when I was 29. It's not that I haven't been growing - I've definitely grown a lot through the scheduling fiasco at school, if nothing else. What bothers me is that I'm feeling limited in the other areas where I should be growing - mostly because I am wasting hours every day doing things that don't result in growth. The two big ones right now are Reddit and Minecraft. I say it like it's a huge deal, but it's basically just some extra time that I want to spend more carefully. Looking back on the last 10 years of my life, I don't really wish that I had spent more time playing Guitar Hero or Starcraft 2 or the various other video games that I've invested hundreds of hours into. Let's be honest - video games are an escape from reality like drugs and alcohol. Granted,...

I was researching "time management" strategies and came across a wonderful website  where I was reminded to set goals first. You can't manage your time wisely if you don't have goals. It also reminded me to prioritize - but defined prioritizing much different than anything I've ever heard before. Prioritizing doesn't mean deciding what to do first or what's most important: it means that you decide which things are NOT important and should be crossed off the list. Now I'm guessing that it was written with work-related to-do lists in mind, but it really struck me as what things I should "cross off" in my everyday life habits. So I made a list of my current life goals and then a list of things that don't contribute whatsoever to those goals that I should stop doing. Here's the list: Life goals (in no particular order): Be healthier. Family oriented. Life wisdom. Improve character. Homeowner. Community. Enjoy life. Music. Soc...

This is a private post, so if your name isn't Luke Juras then please don't read on. I don't put in a ton of time leading worship each week. On a regular week, when I'm playing all by myself, I go on Sunday from 4:45 to 6:00, so just over an hour. I also spend at the very least half an hour picking music and getting it ready for worship. That means choosing 3-4 songs and what order to sing them in, maybe picking which verses to do for longer hymns, and then creating a document with all of the lyrics on one page for performance. I used to print copies for the congregation too, but now I communicate the songs with the pastor and tech guy, and it gets put up on the screen. That's bare minimum. Some weeks it is more difficult to pick songs and it takes me an hour just to get the right ones in the right order. Sometimes I have a request and/or decide to learn a new song. So then I'm spending an hour or two picking the music, plus an hour on Sundays performing, so ...

Boy, what a schedule. I sat down yesterday and planned out my weekly schedule for at least this first semester. Basically, if I show up at 7:30 and work until 5:00, I will have about 30 minutes of free time for finishing my to-dos. That's not a lot! I also have a lot of good habits that I want to get into (and a couple that I want to get out of, which this post is about) including playing piano, practicing yoga, going outside, playing with the kids, and helping with the bedtime routine - and going to bed earlier. But when I write out the time requirements of each day, I find that there are several days where I have zero time for myself. I'm not used to that! I'm used to sitting at the computer every day  and zoning out on Minecraft or posting on Reddit or Facebook. So Mondays, for example, I will be waking up at 5:30 to do Andrew's medicine, then practice yoga and piano, take a shower, make and eat breakfast, and spend about 30 minutes with Megan before leaving for scho...

Well, I didn't do a very good job of keeping up with my notebook journal this summer, so about a week ago, I decided that I would just write a big journal entry about the whole entire summer and use Blogger so that I could upload photos too. So the last day of school and PIR was May 25th. Mark came down for Memorial weekend and we spent some time at Mom and Dad's house in Great Falls. Megan and I took the kids up to the cabin that weekend and hiked the trail to the cliff. We came home on the 27th, and I played for the Memorial Day services on May 28th. I started thinking about the fence project and turned in the paperwork to the office, but also got called to be a lifeguard for the summer and took my certification classes in Cutbank over the first weekend in June. I spent each day working on the band library project, but didn't get it finished until the end of the summer because of everything else going on. We took a trip up to our favorite campground on June 4th and hi...

Wow, where do I start? The fence project is the biggest project that I have taken on in my recent memory. Unfortunately, it also highlighted my weakness of severely under-estimating the amount of time that it takes to get these kinds of things done, like thinking I could put up all the rails in one day instead of the actual week that it took. But before jumping into all of the details, maybe I should start at the beginning. The fence project was an idea that started before Andrew was born. Ashlynn was getting old enough to walk around and explore, and she got her first few spankings from walking out into the road instead of staying in the yard. Meanwhile, Megan and I started throwing around ideas of what we wanted to budget for, including house projects, dream vacations, and musical instruments. After Andrew was born and we had spent a summer at home with him, we both agreed to put a fence around the yard so that the kids could go play outside without having to worry about them getti...