Seminary Planet

Not sure if it’s because the kids and I have been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 a little lately, or because I’ve re-discovered the goodness of Photojojo, but I made this little plaentoid of the Seminary the other day.

Planeta STBM

I used this tutorial from the Photojojo site to turn a panorama that I had shot with the Photosynth app on my phone into a planet.

I’m thinking of making them into t-shirts and selling them to seminary students. What do you think?

You should also check out:
Church Choir at the Mall
Panoramic View of the Seminary
Zocalo Ice Rink Panorama (2008)

Our Favorite Movies of 2011


We don’t go to the movies much at all. We rent them every once in a while, especially when our Blockbuster has special deals and we can rent movies for 10 pesos each (about 75 cents).

In 2011, I’m not really sure how many movies we watched. I know I took Nathan a few times, and I know we spent some nights in watching a movie we rented. Our kids love popping popcorn and hanging out in front of the TV (even though we don’t do it often).

So here’s our family’s list of top 5 movies we watched this year.

  1. The Muppets – we just saw this one in the theater, and it was great to relive some childhood memories and share them with our kids.
  2. Gnomeo and Juliet – for a while Nathan said this was his favorite movie ever.
  3. Kung Fu Panda 2 – This movie was fun. I think the new TV series helped us like it even more.
  4. The Smurfs – We had to wait to watch this one until it came out on DVD because we couldn’t find it in English anywhere in Mexico City.
  5. Mr. Popper’s Penguins – The book that this movie is (loosely) based on was part of our curriculum this year. We had to go see the movie in the theater.

What were your family’s favorite movies this year? Let us know in the comments.

PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT: If you like watching movies, or if you just realize there’s nothing good on TV now, you should check out Netflix. Janell has a post on Saving You Dinero about how you can sign up and get a 30 day free trial of Netflix. If you’re thinking about trying it out, please be sure to use her links on her blog and help our ministry.

This post includes affiliate links. If you click and buy something, we get a little commission, but as always I wouldn’t recommend something I didn’t really like.

Documenting your Life


Yesterday our family spent some time watching old videos on our YouTube channel. We easily spent almost an hour watching some milestones from the last few years. We re-lived some special family moments, like Christmas last year, crawling and first steps, blowing bubbles, and other moments we’ll never forget. The kids loved seeing themselves on TV (we have a computer hooked to our TV), and it made me thought of the importance of documenting your life.

I think one of the reasons that social networks like Facebook (and newer ones like Google+ and Path) have become so popular is that we want to document our lives. It’s important to be able to look back and see what’s going on. In fact, we’ve always done it. It’s just changed over the years.

We’ve watched old home movies on old projectors. I’ve looked through shoe boxes of old photos. My father in law has even broken out the slide projector in the past to show us old pictures.

These things may not be interesting to others, but they will be invaluable to us in the future. That’s one of the reasons I’ve posted over 7500 pictures to Flickr, why we have a videoblog, and why I’ve become slightly obsessed with Instagram, and it’s why I’m hoping to document each day in 2012 with a summary photo that I’ll probably only post to Flickr (If I post them at all).

What do you do to document your life? Are you going to do anything in 2012 to do it better?

Oh…I found a pretty cool service called “Pummlevision” that makes a quick summary video of your photos. It’s cool. Here’s one the service made last night of my last 2000 Flickr photos. It took about 5 minutes.

Church Choir at the Mall

We’ve been attending First Baptist Church of Satelite. Tomorrow night they are having a 200 voice choir Christmas concert with an orchestra and everything.

Wednesday they performed at a local mall, so we went to the mall, got pictures with Santa, and checked out the choir. Here’s a quick picture of what it looked like. I used the Photosynth app to take the picture.

Panorama of the mall - Santa and church choir

Contextualization and Guadalupe


December 12 is a huge day in Mexico. It’s the day that millions of pilgrims descend on the Basilica that stands in Tepeyac on the northern part of the City. This Basilica is dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Patron Saint of Latin America.

I’ve written a lot about this day in the past, and you can see all of my posts on the Virgin of Guadalupe here.

Recently (last year), I wrote something else about this topic, but I’ve hesitated to publish it. There aren’t a lot of people who will be interested in a 23 page paper about contextualizing the message of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

However, there might be some missionaries or Mexican church leaders out there who should read it, so I’ve decided to publish it here so that you can download it and read it if you’re interested.

Click here to download: The Virgin of Guadalupe in the Mexican Context