Gross things in NYC in no particular order

• Grabbing the warm part of the pole in the subway.
• Humans picking up dog excrement.
• Pigeons.
• Rats.
• Walking into an invisible stench of garbage, sewer, BO, or something you just can't put your finger on...and you wouldn't want to.
• Crowded subway car with no AC in the middle of July.
• Dried throw-up on the sidewalk, particularly prevalent on early Sunday mornings.
• Being caught in a sudden downpour with no umbrella...in Central Park (yes it's happened to me, and it was gross).
• 59th St and 5th Ave where the carriage horses are...it's a mix of manure, hay, and horse food all smashed together (I wonder if they sample it now and then...that's gross!).
• 85% of public bathrooms (it's a great thing when you find a clean one!).

Life Group

So Forefront has life groups three times a year. Out spring one just finished. We were looking at the gospel of John. It was pretty different since we did the entire book in about 9 weeks. We were having to do like 3 chapters at a time to get all the way through at times. But we got to see the big themes in John, like Life, Divinity, Love, Truth, stuff like that. Anyway, for our last meeting we did some artistic reflection. We had paints, playdoh, and I played a song I had written on my guitar the week earlier. It was all pretty awesome. Kevin, who is a music connoisseur played some sweet "artistic" music he had on his ipod as we created our art.
Here is Katie and her fish. This is one of the fist caught by the boy to feed the 5000.
Here is Carrie's pic reflecting the Life that Jesus gives.

Here we kind of took a picture too late and Kevin was taking his playdo masterpiece apart...

Here's my picture. I just wanted to paint, so I started splattering and dripping paint on the paper. It looked cool, so I ran with it. I decided that it's the blood of Christ on the road to the cross.

Afterward, we went to a bar close by to hang out and eat hushpuppies! Yeah!

All in all, it was a great group. Some are moving away :( but the rest of us will hopefully stick together during the Summer as we look at the book of Proverbs.

The Mets

So it's either the Mets or the Yankees. You've got to pick one right? I'm not sure it's the same as Chicago with the Cubs and the White Sox where you must pick one and be against the other. It's definitely not real heated in New York. But at this point, when people ask, I always say I'm a Mets fan more than a Yankees fan. Why you ask? Well, it all goes back to my childhood.....not. A few experiences. Comparing the fan base, Mets fans were much more excited and supportive of their team at the first game I went to (granted I sat in pretty bad bleachers at the Yankees game I went to). Then there's the sense of just jumping on the bandwagon of the Yankees, since they are iconic of New York City. Then there's ARod and his fickleness (will he stay with the Yankees or not? How many more millions does he need?).
If you know me well, you know that I've never been a hard-core fan of any team anywhere. So who knows if being a Mets fan will stick? And yes, I did have to do some wikipedia searches to make sure that some info in the post was correct if that tells you anything.
So a few weeks ago, Forefront had a volunteer appreciation and Caren got a bunch of us decent tickets to the Mets Braves game (Mets won by 1, yes!). So here's my boyish picture at Shea Stadium. It was so cold that day!