A new career?

My friends and I had a joke in medical school...you always need to have a backup career in case medicine doesn't work out. Now, maybe for some people it wasn't so much of a joke, but fortunately for the people I knew, well, we all graduated in the end at least. So my backup career was going to be managing a band. I did have a brief stint as a concert organizer in college (AuggieFests I, II, and III), and got to drive some Christian bands around one summer when I volunteered at CreationFest West outside of Spokane, WA in 2000 (Switchfoot, Out of Eden, the Katinas, "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" author Joshua Harris, and my all time favorite band delirious?). It didn't sound like such a bad back up plan. I think that Eric's backup plan would have been to be a rock star. Maybe in another life we still would have met and gotten married, and I could have been his band manager and tour organizer. Of note, most of you probably know that Eric is a semi-rock star (at least in the eyes of his wife), and has a couple of home-grown CDs out, and has his own myspace site. If you haven't checked it out, you should.

That's a good transition into the real topic of this blog. One of Eric's musical inspirations is a terrific artist named Andrew Peterson. He's put out a number of CDs which are full of great folky tunes and amazing lyrics....like, "This is not another song about the mountains, except about how hard they are to move. Have you ever stood before them, like a mustard seed who's waiting for some proof?" Good stuff. Plus, he's a big Tolkien fan (like us!). Check out his website here. Now we've learned that Andrew is venturing into the world of children's books. His first book, entitled, "On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness,"comes out at the end of the month. I went on his website the other day and found out that we had the chance to become BLOG REVIEWERS of his book! We got our approval email this morning and are eagerly awaiting our free copy of his book, so we can read it and post a review (this excites us for several reasons. One, it's Andrew Peterson. Two, see previous blog post about our affinity to free stuff). Stay tuned--it's due to post March 17-22. Perhaps this will morph into a new career for us. people send us free stuff and we review it on our blog! Of course, there's not a lot of money in free blog reviews....