February '06

Well, this month has come and gone...it was quite uneventful for us. The latest news for me (Lori) is that I thought I lost $2,000 worth of equipment from my lab on campus. I thought I left it at church, but it turns out that I left it in a classroom I gave a lecture in one Friday afternoon. Sad thing is, it took me 2 weeks to realize it was missing! We had people at church looking for it, and I even had campus and the town police filing reports for it. It was actually found the same evening I "lost" it and returned to one of the administrative assistants in my department. She had it in her office for 2 weeks! That just goes to show that i need to visit her more often. Oh yeah, and I need to work harder on NOT being an absent-minded professor.

Lately I've been dealing with the struggles of managing a university classroom. I am a pretty lax teacher, and my lectures are usually very open to discussion and input from the students. After my first exam this semester, I had a small revolution in the classroom. Students were complaining (in class) about their grades and arguing with me about why the wrong answer should have been marked right. That debate simmered, and a week later, after administering a quiz, the same problems popped up again. I left class that day feeling frustrated with teaching, and I felt like a bit of a failure. This was completely different from what I experienced with teaching last semester. I had a wonderful group of students who were eager to learn and were very respectful. You know, I hear that students in England stand up when the professor enters the room. I don't think it'll ever get that good here in the States...not that I want an ovation when I enter. Well, maybe just once! Anyway, I had a nice conversation with a seasoned professor in my department, who has won awards for teaching. She gave me really helpful advice that I used the very next lecture, and things appear to be going much better. The second exam is in two days from now, so we'll see if her advice made an impact on post-exam revolution. That's all for me...I am really going to try to write more often. Perhaps on a weekly basis.....

Lori

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Hi this is Anthony, Lori said I have to write quick before the month is over. I just finished hooking up our phone line to our new Vonage VOIP router. Basically this means all our calls will now go out over the internet instead of the regular phone lines. 500 minutes of local and long distance for $14.99 a month is hard to beat. Plus we get caller id and voicemail for free.

My big project for february was redoing the website for the Africana Research Center at Penn State University . The updated site will probably go up tomorrow. I also purchased some software for my studio to make all my recording sound more professional. I had used a demo version of this software when mixing down my album, but now I could afford to buy them.

Lori and I are putting about half our income right now towards paying off debt. We plan to be out of debt except for our mortgage by December. It's hard to watch all that money go by without touching it, when we don't even have real couches yet, and we're sleeping on an air mattress, but in about 10 months.....look out Tempurpedic. I encourage everyone to check out Dave Ramsey ( www.daveramsey.com ) if you want to get fired up about getting out of debt. Makes you realize how nice it would be to actually be able to do with your money what you want every month rather than sending it away towards payments.

My band is going through some lineup changes right now which makes it difficult to book any gigs, but we're still trying to practice regularly and getting ready to do some recording soon for a new demo. The good thing is that through the hard times that we've been having as a band, it's caused us to grow closer spiritually. We realize that we can't effectively minister to other people we play for if we can't even minister to each other within the band. The experiences that some are going through are making us all realize how important what we're trying to do is going to be to people who are hurting.

If you haven't bought our CD yet, you can buy it from just about anywhere on the web

www.anthonystauffer.com
www.cdbaby.com
www.amazon.com
www.christianblues.net

Or on the itunes music store, or on napster....

Oh yeah, the other big story for the month. One of my very good friends from high school, Dan Kreider, won the superbowl with the Pittsburgh Steelers. I make it a point to tell everyone that we're friends. That makes me sound important because I know him......hehe

That's all for me, if Lori tells me the password for this thing, I'll write more often.

Anthony