Pictures, Recap, USC Basketball

Well, I figured I would give an update on the Traylor household.

First, more pictures have been added to our Shutterfly account. Check out: "First Snow at Our First Home , our "Trip to Chuck and Jiff's House", "MommaNelle's Birthday Party", and our "Valentines Day Party". These albums, along with all our other ones, can be found at our Shutterfly account, or our Photos page.

Second, I had the opportunity to record last night with my friend Josh Murphy. Josh has some songs that he has begun recording, and about 2 weeks ago, emailed me 2 of them and asked if I would begin working up some stuff for them. So last night I had the pleasure of recording some string arrangements I worked up on his song "You Can't Hide Your Love". Hopefully when he gets a final product, I can get y'all a short demo of the song so you can hear it. Josh is a talented musician. He actually leads the music for CRU (USC's Campus Crusade for Christ). But most importantly, he loves the Lord and wants God to receive all the glory when he does music. So obviously, it's a joy to do music with him. Check him out at his Myspace account, and his Purevolume account (you can actually hear a pre-strings version of "You Can't Hide Your Love" here).

Third, Vanessa and I had the opportunity to go up to the mountains in SC with my parents to Chuck and Jiff's (uncle and aunt) house this past weekend. They own a ton of land up there, and have this beautiful mansion. We got to hang out with family, eat good food, and shoot on their shooting range. On Saturday, we all headed into Greenville and ate at PF Changs (That was out first time eating there. It was very good. But I would argue that Miyos is just as good.) Vanessa and I then headed on back to Columbia. One thing that was fun during our time up there was getting to discuss some family history with Chuck. My family (on my mom's side) has passed down over the last 1oo+ years letters written by my great-great-great..etc...grandfather to his wife (and also letters from her to him) while he was fighting in the Civil War. Chuck is a huge Civil War buff, and he and Jiff have been transcribing these letters. He got a lot of the letters out and we looked at letters that date back to the Civil War. Me and my dad, being history people, obviously ate this all up! You can see pictures of our time up there here.

Fourth, on Valentines day, Vanessa and I had some friends over. The plan was to eat dinner, and then watch Fireproof. However, after dinner, us guys made our way into the living room where we began playing Mario Kart on the Wii. I guess the girls could tell we were having a good time, and they didn't want to stop us, so they got out board games and played those instead. Such sweet ladies! You can see photos of that here. By the way though; our friends Charlie and Lauren left their copy of Fireproof with us so Vanessa and I could watch it. We finally had some time to watch it, and we really enjoyed it. Yeah, the acting is a little cheezy (but a huge improvement from Facing the Giants), but it's really good. Go see it if you haven't already.

Finally, go Gamecocks! This evening they played Kentucky. It was a battle for 1st in the SEC East. Carolina has stunk the last few years in bball, but our new coach Darrin Horn has done a great job turning this team around. What's cool is I googled "watch south carolina kentucky basketball online" and one of the first results to come up was a link to http://tr.im/uscbball where they are able to provide feeds to games that are currently on tv. So I was able to watch the game! Wow, USC looked good. They destroyed Kentucky! It's so exciting to finally be able to get excited about our basketball team again!

Alright, that's all for now. Peace like a river...