{"id":3142,"date":"2012-12-21T23:52:34","date_gmt":"2012-12-22T04:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/?p=3142"},"modified":"2012-12-22T00:03:26","modified_gmt":"2012-12-22T05:03:26","slug":"ben-update-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/3142\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t been blogging much this&#8230; year?  I guess I&#8217;ve been letting Jill do the Alice\/family updates and haven&#8217;t bothered to post what&#8217;s going on with me.  Maybe I go through seasons of not wanting or caring to let the outside world know what&#8217;s going on?<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an update on what&#8217;s up with me, if you care to read it!<\/p>\n<p>Musically, I&#8217;ve been involved in several things this year.  I&#8217;m in a cover band called the Cassettes, and we play mostly 80&#8217;s and 90&#8217;s covers in bars when we can get paying gigs.  We&#8217;ve had several recently, and it&#8217;s fun to be gigging regularly after two years of playing together.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m also involved in a project with my friend Tony (an excellent guitarist and songwriter) called Grace and Caperings (five-person band).  It&#8217;s really fun, and I get to add neat textures and ideas.  This week we recorded in a studio in Cambridge, which was three solid days of work.  Nothing is finished yet, but hopefully soon.<\/p>\n<p>Church life is great.  We continue to host at our house, and I&#8217;m consistently blessed by my amazing brothers and sisters in Christ&#8230; I can&#8217;t express how thankful I am for them.  They encourage me and give me an outlet for teaching.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m also teaching a 5th and 6th grade Sunday school class this year at Trinity church in Bolton.  It has up to 12 kids at a time, but so far I&#8217;m managing.  I bribe them with donuts and teach crazy things about the Bible they&#8217;ve never learned.  We also do some kind of origami every class.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m still teaching guitar, as ever!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m also working on a *huge* coding project in conjunction with the Ayer public access channel and my friend Charlie, the president of said organization.  It&#8217;s not that lucrative yet, but hopefully will be in the near future as we sign up subscribers to our service.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I&#8217;ve been a bit of a geek today (maybe this was the reason I felt like blogging) and wanted to post my results.  Here&#8217;s me playing an ancient text-based game called Angband that is way more fun that it should be:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-shot-2012-12-21-at-11.21.00-PM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-shot-2012-12-21-at-11.21.00-PM-300x168.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And here&#8217;s my latest geeky desktop using GeekTool, a fun thing for geeks:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-shot-2012-12-21-at-11.21.09-PM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screen-shot-2012-12-21-at-11.21.09-PM-300x168.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Being a dad is going well, too.  Alice seems to like me a lot.  I&#8217;m almost certain that&#8217;s not a great indicator of good parenting, but there it is.  Jill is quite a good mother and has &#8220;the gift&#8221; in this area.  We agree on most parental\/discipline issues, and everyone who takes care of Alice comments on her good behavior.  I strongly suspect that this thing called &#8220;the terrible twos&#8221; doesn&#8217;t exist.  Jill also reads her a lot of Bible stories, and we don&#8217;t focus much on the Santa thing, so (amusingly) Alice knows more about Abraham and Joseph than reindeer or elves.  But that&#8217;s cool with us \ud83d\ude42  Finally, Alice is really good at physical things.  She takes occasional gymnastics classes, climbs trees, knows how to pivot on a dime, jumps off tall objects, does wheelbarrow walks and pushups and somersaults, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I&#8217;ve been buying and selling guitar gear for a few years now, trying to get that perfect mix of portability, sound, and musical geekiness.  I&#8217;ve gotten closer than ever.  Here&#8217;s some pics of my latest iteration.  Yes, my pedalboard is a tiny briefcase!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_5734.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_5734-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_5737.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/IMG_5737-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t been blogging much this&#8230; year? I guess I&#8217;ve been letting Jill do the Alice\/family updates and haven&#8217;t bothered to post what&#8217;s going on with me. Maybe I go through seasons of not wanting or caring to let the outside world know what&#8217;s going on? Here&#8217;s an update on what&#8217;s up with me, if [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theholtsite.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}