Thursday night after class, Chel and I met at the SMU rec center. By the time we finished our workout, the frat guys had wrapped up their intramural basketball game, so I challenged Chelsea to shoot a few hoops with me.

It took me back to my days as the starting center for the Olney Cubs freshman basketball team, when my stat line looked something like this:

10 points, 2/5 free throws, 3 fouls, 0 assists, 5 rebounds

I should clarify that’s an estimate of my stats for my entire three-year basketball career, and that I became the starting center because we only had seven players on our team, I was the tallest, and the real starting center had to move to Georgia with his family the year before.

So quite surprisingly, I actually made a couple of my first few shots at the SMU gym but bricked the majority.

“Wow,” Chelsea said, “I’m learning something new about you! When is the last time you played?”

“Ah, ninth grade,” I replied proudly.

“Oh, so almost 20 years ago!”

I stopped dribbling. Could ninth grade really be that long ago? Indeed it could, which led to two feelings in that moment as I stood near the three-point line:

First, amazement that time goes by as fast as it does.

And second, gratitude that in that almost 20 years, I have been blessed to learn a lot, meet the love of my life, and get closer to discovering my calling. And to realize that my calling is not to become a professional basketball player.

“Wow, yeah, so 20 years ago,” I said as I bricked another shot. Proving once again that the more things change, the more my basketball skills stay the same.

Chel and I recently took the drastic step of canceling our cable, and in the process, we created for ourselves a gadget and entertainment nirvana. Here’s how.

For my birthday, Chel wanted to get me a new computer since our old home computer was on its last legs. I had been eyeing a new iMac for quite a while, but also came upon the idea of connecting a teeny weeny Mac mini to the TV in our living room.

Connecting a computer to a big screen TV might seem a little odd, but it made a lot of sense for us since we already had laptops from work and we rarely spent time in our home office (more commonly known as Addy’s room).

We had heard about people going this route and ditching cable in favor of watching shows online through Hulu and other sites. And with a TV tuner card, you can watch live TV from an over-the-air antenna and you really don’t need cable.

The Mac mini Home Theater Setup

So I took the plunge at the Apple Store and ended up with this setup:

• Mac mini with 2.53 GHz processor, 320GB hard drive and 4GB RAM.
• Keyboard and mouse. The mini doesn’t come with either and you need both, obviously. We went with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
• EyeTV Hybrid tuner (including the EyeTV 3 DVR software) to watch live TV.
• HP Photosmart C4780 wireless printer, which we put back in the office so that we can print out whatever we need while keeping Unsightly Printers out of the living room.

A few other goodies were required to make the setup complete:

• The Logitech Harmony Remote controls the Mac mini and all our other gadgets.
• An HDTV antenna connects to the EyeTV. More on that in a bit.
• Good, fast wireless Internet.
• Long enough cables connect the audio & video signals to the TV and speakers. My new favorite cable source is Monoprice.com, where for example, I got a 15-foot miniDisplay port to HDMI cable for the insanely low price of $13.

My first mistake in this whole setup was coming home with a “rabbit ears” antenna to connect to the EyeTV. Yes, they still make those, and yes, I had barely gotten them out of the box and extended them all the way before Chel said we needed to invest in a more hide-able antenna. In hindsight, it would have been a little ghetto to spend all this money and have rabbit ears sticking up behind all of this.

So back we went to Best Buy to exchange the rabbit ears. I was just going to run in and out, but Chel decided to come in with me. After I found a much more decor-conscious antenna, I discovered Chel hypnotized in front of the new TVs.

“Must….get…this,” she said in a semi-catatonic trance.

After taking a moment to wonder what had become of my gadget-phobic wife, I too became hypnotized, and what began as a trip to exchange a $10 antenna ended with us walking out with a 55″ Samsung LED TV.

Word to the wise: should you ever decide to go this route, you too will likely want a new TV out of it, and such TV will make All. The. Difference. When we first connected the mini to our old DLP TV, I could barely read the icons on the screen, although I would not have admitted that to Chelsea. When we got the new TV turned on, one of the first things we saw was a beer commercial with an extreme closeup of the water droplets rolling down the frosty glass. It made Chel’s mom ask for a beer. She hates beer! That’s how good this TV is.

The software

There are a few pieces of software we use on a daily basis:

• The aforementioned EyeTV software serves as our DVR and records all the episodes of The Bachelor, Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries that Chelsea and I could care to watch. (Me? Watch those shows? Never!)
• Hulu Desktop is our gateway to streaming entertainment goodness such as Family Guy and The Daily Show. (You know, manly things worth watching.)
• The Boxee beta has useful apps like CNN, Pandora and a Netflix app to watch (mostly old B-grade) movies instantly. I’ve tried Plex too but am not smart enough to make sense of it, and Boxee works well 8 times out of 10.
• iPhoto provides a fun way to make people suffer through vacation slideshows.
• iTunes for music, of course, but the great thing about iTunes on a big screen is the Visualizer that draws entrancing geometric patterns on the screen in time with the music. It’s great fun at parties. Seriously.
• Remote Buddy enables the Logitech remote to control a wider variety of apps, including all of the above, so we can put the keyboard and mouse away most of the time.

There are also a few must-have iPhone apps, too:

• Mobile Air Mouse turns the phone into a trackpad/keyboard/remote and is great for web surfing and basic stuff, although I wouldn’t recommend it for typing long essays such as this.
• Remote by Apple controls iTunes from afar and is a great way to change music without going back into the living room.
• The EyeTV app connects via wifi and streams recorded programs. This was great the other day, for instance, when Chel was surfing the web on the big screen and I could watch The Bachelor The Office on my phone. There’s a free web app that streams live TV over wifi or 3G, but I haven’t tried that one yet.
• Jaadu VNC enables the phone to connect back to the desktop and control the computer remotely.

So, have we missed cable?

Yes and no, but mostly no. The main times I’ve missed cable have been sports-related. While the biggest events (like the Super Bowl) are on over-the-air TV, I’ve missed being able to watch some TCU and Mavs games. There are sites like Channelsurfing.net that have helped with that somewhat, and we get some games on ESPN360.com through AT&T DSL, but a setup like this will miss some games.

I’ve also missed being able to turn on CNN and such for breaking news, but hey, breaking news is online, too, and the news websites have started streaming more live video when stories warrant.

It’s also been a bit tough to explain the setup to houseguests, since it’s not quite as simple as turning on the tube and handing them the remote.

On the plus side, a setup like this really empowers us viewers to choose what we want to watch and not tie ourselves down as much to some network programmer’s schedule. And it’s just pretty darn fun to plop down on the couch and surf the web on a big-arse wall monitor, even if the couch does not always make for the best mouse pad.

In conclusion

While this setup is not for everyone, and does have a few more moving parts than your average cable-box-connected-to-the-TV-box, I’ve really enjoyed it and I think Chel has liked it too, which is saying something since she is much more gadget-averse.

We’re in an era of blurring lines between computers and TVs and phones and tablets and whatever else is next, and it’s been fun to jump into that era in our own way. I reckon it’s just gotten started.

But I shouldn’t have felt that way, because I actually left the retreat reminded of something important that will help me do my job better.

The main presenters were the chair of our board of trustees, our VP of development, and the university president — good speakers, all. They were at their best when they put aside the powerpoint slides and statistics and bar charts of our campaign progress and told a funny story, or spoke from the heart.

As you might expect at a retreat, they rigged it so that we wouldn’t sit at tables with people we normally work with, so I had the chance to sit next to a fellow law student and a fundraiser who covers a certain regional territory. The law student and I commiserated about how much we were ready to be done with school and how little we wanted to practice law at a big firm. We shared that we both want to stay in higher ed, probably in some fundraising capacity.

So we asked the fundraiser how she got started, and she shared her path of beginning at a local nonprofit and ending up at SMU. Along the way, she discovered that she really liked being a storyteller.

“That’s the key to being a good fundraiser,” she said. “Telling a good story that people can identify with. That, and not being afraid of a little silence in a conversation.”

I silently let that sink in, and was reminded that making and sharing good stories may be the secret to good fundraising or marketing — but it’s also the secret to a well-lived life.

So this year, I’m going to practice making better stories, and sharing them. I’ve got a lot to learn.

Thankfully, she didn’t judge a country by its trains.

Our six-hour journey from Cannes to Cinque Terre, Italy required switching to three different trains, and each got progressively worse. As you might expect, the double-decker train we started on in Cannes was quite clean and modern, complete with power outlets at each seat to charge your portable electronic devices.

By the time we jumped on the final train that would take us to Manarola, the windows barely opened to get some air circulating, and graffiti lined the outside and inside of the cabin.

Once we got to Manarola at about 10pm, we stepped off the train, rolled our bags to the main street and heard…nothing. Not a sound but the occasional breeze off the Mediterranean.

You see, the towns of the Cinque Terre are largely off-limits to cars, except for the very rare delivery truck, taxi or a set of buses that are permitted to drive through. The residents park in special lots at the edge of the towns and walk. As a result, sweet, sweet silence is the sound most often heard. Particularly in Manarola, which is the sleepiest of the towns and practically shuts down by sundown.

There happened to be one of the aforementioned green buses parked on the main street, so we asked him where our hotel was. “I can take you,” he said, “But it’s only about 200 meters that way so I bet you can make it.”

200 meters? No sweat! Although, we failed to realize that it was 200 meters at basically a 45-degree incline. While rolling our bags behind us.

When we finally got to the La Torretta hotel, the host Gabrele welcomed us with a much needed cold towel and glass of champagne. He helped us navigate the steps down to our suite and get us settled in. While we couldn’t tell at night because most of the lights in the town were off, our room had a great view of the sea and of Manarola.

The next day, we took the ferry to Monterrosso, the first of the villages and the only one with a large beach. After a wonderful lunch of pesto pasta and swordfish, Chel caught some rays at the beach and I found a couple of worthy gelato shops. Dinner that night was back in Manarola and was one of the best meals of our trip.

Thursday, Chel started out at the local swimming hole down by the ocean while I took my customary one-day-on, one-day-off pass from the sun. Thankfully, Gabriele had told us that jellyfish were more frequent this time of year, so Chelsea has kept a watchful eye and avoided being stung.

After a lunch of pizza and gelato, we decided to venture off to the other towns to search for a painting that would help us remember Cinque Terre. In Vernazza, we met an artist named Dragan who did some beautiful work. We also discovered that Vernazza has a nice little beach area, so we’re headed back there today and will meet Dragan to look at some of his larger paintings.

Our visit to Cinque Terre has been a wonderful change of pace from Nice and Cannes. To be in a place with almost no cars, with hilltop vineyards on your right and the ocean on your left is like stepping back a few generations.

It’s still at the top of my list of favorite places in the world, and now it has taken its place atop Chelsea’s list. I’m so thankful we were able to come here together, and also glad that Chelsea chose not to judge a place by its trains.

Yesterday, though, our hearts were filled and spirits renewed by what became possible.

The day started at the Hotel Villa La Tour in old town Nice. One of the innkeepers, Eva, had heard about our predicament of the lost glasses and was eager to tell us just where we needed to go. Turns out there was a shopping mall just three stops up on the tram (think DART rail) where an optician could most certainly help us that day.

Eva was our guardian angel; we never would have found that place without her. (I didn’t even know Nice had shopping malls!)

In the store a nice woman took one look at my prescription and said, “Oh, yes, it’s possible to get that done today.” Chel immediately hugged her with relief. We picked out some frames and spent the rest of the day strolling (as much as was possible without glasses) down the boulevard of shops.

After we got my glasses and I could see again, we headed by bus off to Cannes. We got caught in rush hour traffic, but we got to see the real insides of the city as we traveled off the coast along the back roads the locals take. We saw little old ladies and teenage kids and young mothers and their children, heading to the market or running other errands much like they do in Dallas or Olney or Boston.

We were a little worried about the hotel before we arrived there; the online research we had done uncovered some dicey reviews saying the decor was over the top or that it wasn’t worth what you paid. It sounded like a neat concept, though — each floor decorated in the style of a different continent — so we went for it.

When we got to the check-in desk the attendant informed me that we would be staying on the Europe floor (what we had hoped for) and that we had been upgraded to a suite at no extra charge (more than we could have hoped for).

Chel didn’t hear that we had been upgraded, so imagine her surprise when we got to the corner room and discovered a living room with big comfy chairs and dining area, bathroom with rain shower and jacuzzi tub, and bedroom with a view of the Ritz Carlton next door, and the Mediterranean just beyond that! We couldn’t believe it was possible.

After swimming in the rooftop pool we headed off to dinner. The night before, we were scolded at one restaurant for asking to split a dinner (”It’s just not possi-ble!!”) and ended up at a place down the street where we got the driest fish and rice and worst hamburger ever created. But last night we lucked out with the best dinner we have had on the trip thus far; Chel got salmon with a great champagne sauce, and I had chicken with cream sauce. Afterwards, chocolate mousse!

We pondered our good fortune and wondered how our luck had so dramatically changed in the course of a day. I concluded that it was because we took the bad things that had happened before in stride.

It would have been easy to get upset when the air conditioner went out at our first hotel and things weren’t “just so,” or cranky when we were chided for wanting to split a meal, or despondent when my glasses washed away with the tide — but we didn’t. We left ourselves open to what was in store, and were richly blessed because of it.

Today after some time at the beach (sans glasses, don’t worry!), we are off to Italy. From here, who knows what’s possible!

The big news of the day is that I lost my glasses to the ocean today, so I’m flying a bit blind at the moment. The beach we visited had very strong waves, one of which knocked me on my patootie (is that French?) and whisked my glasses and cap away. A kind Frenchman fetched my hat, but my glasses were lost at sea. I hope a blind fish can make use of them!

We got my prescription faxed from the States and are hoping that tomorrow we can find an optician who can crank out a new pair in short order. But, we’re not counting on it…one thing the French have going for them is that they’re rarely in a hurry to do anything.

Other than that minor mishap, our time here has been filled with streetside cafes, beautiful beaches and lovely weather. Yesterday we enjoyed quick trips to Cannes and Monte Carlo.

Tomorrow our friends who traveled with us to Nice are headed to Paris, and after glasses shopping we’ll spend one night in Cannes before heading to Italy. Let’s just hope I can see where we’re going!

I’m here as my dad waits to get a pacemaker put in. One of the medical folks, Larry, came into his room this morning to walk Mom and Dad through the procedure.

Larry told us that the surgeon had been delayed by an emergency surgery. He recommended that Mom, Melinda and I leave the hospital for a bit and give Dad a chance to rest. They would get Dad into surgery as soon as they could.

“Well, we do have some errands to run,” Mom said.

“Sure, go run your errands,” said Larry. “The worst case scenario is that your husband will be gone and you’re not here.”

“Gone, gone?” my mom frantically asked.

“Oh! No, not gone gone. Just gone into surgery!”

I bet poor Larry won’t make that mistake again!

We were planning a low-key Blockbuster night, and I had already gone to the store and picked out the DVD. But all of a sudden, we got the urge to go to the drive-in we had seen on the way to Galveston a couple weeks ago.

It was 8 p.m. and the movie started at 9, so we hustled to the car and headed down our favorite freeway to Ennis, about 30 miles south of downtown.

Apparently a lot of other people had the same idea. It was four lanes of bumper-to-bumper cars pulling in to one of four screens they had going:

For $6 a person we got a double-feature…a pretty good deal! We selected “Bruno” and “The Hangover” as our movies and drove over to a spot in front of screen four.

The snack bar in the center was hopping. We got a large popcorn, a large coke and a bottle of water for another $5.

We got some good laughs, but the overall experience was so much better than the movies themselves. We’ll definitely be back for another double feature.

For the Fourth, we celebrated at Kathryn’s house and caught the fireworks show at the Bush library. Go USA!

“Jesus fixed three sprinklers and told me the best watering schedule to use! I love Jesus”

That caused a bit of a funny misunderstanding. Chel thought I meant that the Son of God had taken a special interest in our landscaping — when in fact, our gardener (pronounced “hey-soos”) merely stopped by to help out with a couple of things.

I do think he may have been inspired, though. Our yard has never looked better!

I love Jesus.