Our Team in Guatemala – Jan, Rose Mary, Rich, Angela, Paul, Barbara, Uncle Dave, Richard G (Gilberto), Lori, and I

To start w/, you can check out forteen thirty photos in my Guatemala photoset at flickr. Once you go to the site, you can click each individual photo to see a bigger version and a brief description. You can also just click “View as Slideshow” in the upper-right corner and it’ll flip through the photos for you.

If you didn’t get my email updates and don’t know what went on, I’m sorry! I’ll do my best and try to get a summary posted here later. Just know I’m back, I’m safe, I’m alive, etc.

For an incredibly brief summary of the trip, let me say this trip will be one I look back on later in life and see as a focal point for great changes. Yeah, I really believe it will be. It’s given me new perspective, new ideas, new hopes, new dreams, and so much more.

Categories: Life, Photographs
Tags: Guatemala

Complete sidenote: Walter put up Just An Alias show #2. It’s got some high energy emo/punk/whatever to get you up and moving.

Posting will slow down to just about, oh, nothing for the next week and a half. I leave for Guatemala on Saturday morning (3/4) and won’t be back till a week from Sunday (3/13).

I’m more or less prepared to go. I’ve got tomorrow night off work so I’ll spend that time packing up and trying to adjust my sleep schedule a bit. I got the remainder of my supplies at the new Super Wal-Mart in town on Monday morning. Nothing quite like being able to buy eggs, shaving cream, diapers, and an umbrella all at the same place.

No, that’s not what I bought for the trip. I actually purchased a bunch of travel-sized toiletries such as shampoo. The big purchase was a new digital camera! Woo! I’m excited about this. It’s much more compact then my previous digital camera, has a 3x zoom lense, and takes shots up to 5.1 megapixels. I bought a 512MB memory card for it today from a lady at work so I should be able to take a few hundred pictures on it without running out of memory. Just gotta have batteries, and I do.

What would this be without something about music?

Newest purchased albums: Matchbook Romance – Stories & Alibis, Matchbook Romance – Voices, Flogging Molly – Drunken Lullabies, Sufjan Stevens – Illinois.

Reviews in Brief
Matchbook Romance – some excellent emo with a bit of an edge. Their newest album, Voices, has parts that remind me a lot of Muse. Their sound has matured a lot, though at points I found myself enjoying the rawer Stories & Alibis. With Voices, the packaging reflects the dark lyrics w/ black everywhere and a somewhat frightening rabbit like an evil version of a creature from Wonderland (y’know, Alice’s place). From what I’ve grasped of the lyrics in my listening thus far and a review I read, the content deals with a lot of bad relationships, celebrity-worship, and a variety of other topics. Apparently, the “Voices” referred to by the album title are the voices of past mistakes in the head.

Flogging Molly – an Irish-American punk band from L.A. The sound remains fairly similar and cohesive throughout the album. It doesn’t provide a lot of variation, but as there’s only about one other Irish punk band I know of (The Dropkick Murphy’s), my musical library contains no comparative sound. It’s got elements of traditional Irish music combined with the usual guitars and bass of punk. (See the Flogging Molly entry at Wikipedia for a full listing.)

Sufjan Stevens – pure indie-rock goodness. This album has 22 tracks on it packed full of powerful lyrics regarding faith, family, love, Frank Lloyd Wright, and zombies. Sufjan’s amazing instrumentation amazes me throughout Illinois and the other work I’ve heard from him thus far. A wide variety of instruments weave through each of the songs with various wind, string, percussion, brass, and other instruments. To top it all off, he has the longest song names of any artist I’ve ever heard. Yes, even longer song names than Fall Out Boy. Plus, I hear Pete Wentz is a huge fake. I digress.

Categories: Life