Skiing, A Frozen Dead Guy, and Matt Wertz

This past Saturday we had a quite an eventful day. It began with a morning of skiing at Eldora.


Immediately after skiing, we met up with our friend who lives in Nederland (the town Eldora is in) and went to a local festival called Frozen Dead Guy Days. The following excerpt from Wikipedia summarizes the story which was the inspiration for the festival:

In 1989, a Norwegian citizen named Trygve Bauge brought the corpse of his recently deceased grandfather, Bredo Morstøl, to the United States. The body was preserved on dry ice for the trip, and stored in liquid nitrogen at the Trans Time cryonics facility from 1990 to 1993.

In 1993, Bredo was returned to dry ice and transported to the town of Nederland, where Trygve and his mother Aud planned to create a cryonics facility of their own. When Trygve was deported from the United States for overstaying his visa, his mother, Aud, continued keeping her father's body cryogenically frozen in a shack behind her unfinished house.

Aud was eventually evicted from her home for living in a house with no electricity or plumbing, in violation of local ordinances. At that time, she told a local reporter about her father's body, and the reporter went to the local city hall in order to let them know about Aud's fears that her eviction would cause her father's body to thaw out.

To this day, Grandpa is still frozen inside a Tuff Shed in Nederland and the Frozen Dead Guy Days apparently celebrates this bizarre situation. Neither of us had ever been to the festival but had heard that the coffin races was the most entertaining part of the weekend. The races were actually quite similar to "The Push" - the shopping cart race which started during my time at Hope College, where the point of the event is the hilarious costumes and not who wins.

This is the NASA team. Unfortunately the coffin crash-landed in the first round and they were eliminated.

My personal favorite was the Double-Dare team, which celebrated one of my favorite childhood TV shows.

The most hilariously dressed team was the Octumom team called "Eight Isn't Enough." Inside the coffin was a woman and eight baby dolls and the people carrying the coffins were all wearing diapers.

Saturday night we then went to see Matt Wertz at the Fox Theatre in Boulder with Laurel, our friend from Hope, and her boyfriend Dominic. This was the third time we had seen Matt Wertz at the Fox as he is Becky's favorite musician and he always puts on a very good live show. He also has to be one of the nicest guys in music as he uses the stage as a platform to share about the mission work in Africa he is involved with, and allows fans to take a CD from his merch table if they sign up to give to the mission. You can kind of see him between Laurel and Becky's heads.


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80's Party

This past weekend our friend Nicole celebrated her birthday by throwing a "Children of the 80's" party. The 80's party theme is one I don't think will ever get old. Here's a few pictures that shows why.


Becky and Nicole.


Becky and I with our good friends Kristen, Joseph, and Nicole. They have all done student ministries with us at our church for the last 4 years.


It's worth mentioning that Becky and I were each awarded a Pez dispenser for having the best costumes at the party.

Please stay tuned for another appearance of my neon green jacket at the Eldora Retro ski day in a few weekends.

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One more thing regarding winter retreat and mustaches

One of my students was so inspired by my amazing mustache and sweet aviator glasses that he drew this sketch on our way to winter retreat a couple of weekends ago. I just got around to scanning it and thought you might enjoy. Please note that in addition to signing his work, he also wrote, "You wish you were this manly" underneath the drawing.

Winter Retreat 2009!

To view a slide show of winter retreat

pictures click here.

(I stole a bunch of pictures from Joy and
Crista's facebook pages since most of
my pictures were of dudes with
mustaches. Hope that's okay.

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This past weekend Becky and I went on our annual winter retreat with the middle school students from our church. This year's retreat was at the Snow Mountain Ranch near Sol Vista ski resort. As always when hanging out with our students, we had a great time.

I grew a very dirty mustache, or whatever you would call that thing on my face, for winter retreat this year. (More on that shortly)


Most of my students spent the day skiing/boarding at Sol Vista. It was a perfect day...fresh snow and sunny. There were some absolutely amazing wipe outs/yard sales by a few of the dudes which was of course very hilarious and only one sprained wrist out of the entire group...and Dylan, who injured his wrist, usually sustains some sort of a head injury when we go to camp so this was actually a step in the right direction.

Below is most of our crew on the mountain in our famous "Justice" pose. (Since this past summer's "Gladiator Games" the 8th grade dudes have been known as team Justice. The pose all of us are doing...except for Cam on the right, is the Justice pose. It's alright Cam you'll get it).


While some of us were skiing, all of the 8th grade girls and some of the dudes were back at the camp having a great time tubing, playing games, and other shenanigans.


Saturday night was a celebration of the mustache, and was the reason I grew facial hair for about five weeks. I actually attended a career fair last week with my full beard so as to not miss out on the festive occasion. This picture shows the 8th grade dudes rocking a wide assortment of fake mustaches. You will also notice we are all wearing the same shirt, which I found at Walmart. At the top of the shirt is a guy doing the "Justice" pose standing on top of a trophy which is labeled "Trophy Husband." Amazing. Yes I also have one.

All weekend long the 8th grade girls had been blowing up balloons and storing them in their rooms in order to pull off a prank early Sunday morning. The picture doesn't really show how awesome this was...the entire 6th and 7th grade girl's hallway was filled with over 500 balloons.


Becky and some of her girls.


I was not the only 8th grade leader who grew a sweet 'stache for winter retreat. My extremely attractive friends Paul and Anthony are on my left and right.


The 'staches caused all sorts of excitement and hilarity. For one thing, we temporarily changed our team name from Justice to Mustiche (pronounced must-ish). And our usual chant which goes: "Just what?...Justice!" became "Must what?...Mustiche!"

Joy (pink sweatshirt in above pictures), had perhaps the funniest line of the weekend when she said something to the effect of, "If Jesus asked me 'Joy would you go out with me?' I would say 'No, Jesus you have a mustache.' "

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Dallas Part 2: Chuck Norris

One cool part of our quick trip to Dallas to visit Tim, Rachel, and Lowell that must be mentioned, is our visit to their church. We often heard Rachel talk about how much she loved her old church in Dallas so it was nice to get to visit. A very important thing you should know about this church is that it is also attended by the one-and-only Chuck Norris.

Yes, Chuck Norris. That is amazing.

Since I brought him up, enjoy a few of my favorite Chuck proverbs:

- when Chuck Norris does a push up, he isn't lifting himself up, he's pushing the world down

- when Chuck Norris jumps into water he doesn't get wet, the water gets Chuck Norris

- outer space exists because it's afraid to be on the same planet with Chuck Norris

- and, my favorite: Chuck Norris counted to infinity, twice

If Chuck Norris attended your church and you were the pastor, where do you think he could best serve? I say he should be an usher. If I saw him at the end of my row I bet I would just throw my whole wallet in.

To close this ridiculous post, I would like to include side-by-side pictures of Chuck and Tim.


I'm very excited to hang out with Chuck in heaven.

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Dallas Part 1: Surprise!

This past weekend we went to Dallas to surprise our good friend Rachel for her birthday. Tim had set the whole thing up and she had quite an amazing reaction when Becky walked into the room. Tim and Rachel were our very close friends in Colorado until they moved to Dallas back in May. Since then they gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, Lowell Bandon, so we were of course very excited to get to meet him.

We first met Tim and Rachel through volunteering with the middle school ministry at our church. We worked with the same grade as them for two years, so we still get to see and hang out with their students every week. Becky told a bunch of Rachel's girls that she would be sending a care package to Rachel for her birthday (not wanting to tell the whole truth in fear that the surprise might be ruined). We brought all of the cards and gifts from her students with us to Dallas to give to her.


It was our first time to Dallas, and from what I could tell the best thing about it is the amazing Mexican food...also the people are very nice. Below is a picture of all of us shortly after eating the best fajitas of all time. Lowell is sound asleep.


You may have noticed the amazing artwork in the background of the previous picture...I have included it here for your enjoyment.


Becky and Lowell.


Tim, Lowell, and me.


On Sunday we went for a walk along a creek in Dallas. We noticed that some guys had kicked their soccer ball to the other side of the river. Zeerza the dog took care of it. It took awhile but she finally got the ball over to our side of the river. Hope you enjoy the video and a lot of giggling by me.

P.S. If you're at all curious as to why I'm rockin' a beard, please check back in a few days.

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A tribute to my grandma

This post is a bit overdue, mostly because it is difficult to know where to start for something like this. My Grandma Loomis, who was my last living grandparent, passed away the Sunday before Christmas. She had always been such an important part of our family and so it was difficult for all of us to lose her.

There are many things I could say about my grandma: she was strong, generous, hospitable, and the greatest cook I have ever met; but a list of attributes never adequately describes a person. From the time we were very young, my family would once a year take a road trip to Florida to spend a week with my grandparents at their beautiful home on a lake near Orlando. Sarah and I would get more excited for these trips than for Christmas morning...there are so many great memories from our times at our grandparents house that it is impossible to begin to recount them. Even when we were teenagers we still so much looked forward to a week spent with our loving grandparents.

For Christmas 2006, my grandma very generously paid for our entire family (Becky and I, mom and dad, Sarah, and Aunt Wendy) to go on a week-long cruise together. That week will forever be one of the greatest weeks of my life. After each day of doing our own various activities we would have dinner together as a family. We would spend hours at the table telling stories and laughing. It was everything family should be. I imagine that must have also been one of the greatest weeks in the long and full life of my grandma. How amazing that must be to sit around a dinner table with your son, daughter, grandkids, and grandkid-in-law and see how much love they all have for each other and how much they appreciate and enjoy the gift of life. I suppose you might realize that you had done something very well to have raised such an incredible family.


We were blessed to all be together one last time for Sarah and Josh's wedding this summer. We had hoped that we would spend this past Christmas together, but unfortunately that was not the case. My grandma will be deeply missed by her family and the many friends she had.

To read the obituary please click here.

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