Today is January 1, 2010. It’s the start of a new year and a new decade. I hope everyone’s time last night was fun and safe.

As I mentioned a few days ago, today I am launching a new blog to document my adventure down under. The new blog address is www.dustinjamespetersen.com. So go there and subscribe and read the posts there to keep up with what’s going on with me.

That’s my new blog. This one will stay up, but it will be very silent and no new content will be posted here.

So go check it out!
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While I’ve been rather silent in the blogosphere as of late, I have been getting ready to head to Sydney in less than two weeks. Among some of the things I’ve been doing to get ready, one of them has been creating a new blog from scratch to share my journey.

The new blog will launch officially on January 1st and I’ll post a link here on that day to point you in the right direction. I’m excited as this new blog will be sort of an unofficial start of my adventure.

Twelve days until I leave.

d

As you can no doubt tell if you’re reading this on the site, (rss subscribers click here), things look way different around here. I’m running a new WordPress theme that is more blog-like and it’s what I’ll be using on here for the foreseeable future. Now, there are also some changes also to where things are located that I’d like to go over..

I’ll probably be tweaking this a little bit more over the next few days and weeks until I get everything just right. Things actually look a lot like they did when I first started this blog a year ago, so it’s kind of neat for me to have a “throwback” theme of sorts.

What do you think of the new look? Like it? Hate it? Anything it needs?

Let me know so I can make it better.

d

Hey folks,

This post is only really aimed at those who subscribe to this blog via rss or email updates. Long story short, I had some issues migrating my feedburner feed to a new email address so I decided to create a new feed url. All of the links on here have been updated with the new url, so click on the subscribe links again, or just grab the url and put it in your feed reader to keep the posts coming to you. The new feed url is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/shaggyworshiper/dustin.

Thanks!

d

It’s been over a month since I was last blogging on here. Prior to last night, my last post was August 12. I was almost to the middle of a NaBloPoMo and just stopped posting. I also stopped twittering, and my time and interaction on Facebook dropped significantly.

Here’s basically what happened:

I got overwhelmed by the internet. The pressure I had put on posting everyday. Keeping up with tweets as well as tweeting. A growing numbers of blogs I subscribe to. It all felt like too much, so I pretty much put a stop to all of it, cold turkey. And then slowly, over the last couple weeks, began slowly re-immersing myself into the world-wide-social-media-interweb one step at a time.

In the meantime, since I’ve been away from the blog, I’m ecstatic to report how God is making ways, opening doors, and providing the funds for my upcoming time in Australia. As of now, the entire first year, tuition and living expenses, are covered and it’s looking like the second year will be covered pretty soon. Amazing.

Also, I’m in the process of redesigning this blog using a theme that I design and build myself. It’s slow going as my knowledge of Photoshop, HTML, and CSS are not extensive. But I’m excited and hopeful that the new design will be really cool.

So, to sum it all up, I’m back. And to conclude this post, I’d like to leave you with the song that’s been dominating time on my iPod and in my head over the last month. Peace.

d

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term NaBloPoMo, (and I don’t blame you if you are), it stands for National Blog Posting Month. It’s about getting in the habit of daily blogging, which given my constant feeling of, “What am I going to write about?”, I felt it would be a good idea to take the challenge of posting something, anything, everyday of August. I’m doing this challenge along with my good friends, Sarah and Mindy. I have no idea what I’m going to write for every day this month, but I’ll do my best to put something. This post will count for August 1.

Here’s to the next 30 days…

d

I’ve been blogging consistently for about a year now and have moved the location around from iWeb, to Shaggy Worshiper, to dustinpetersen.com. I loved blogging under Shaggy Worshiper a lot. This place had a certain feel, a certain swagger to it that I really liked. Then I accidentally broke the site while upgrading to the latest version of WordPress last fall. After breaking my blog and losing all of the content on it, I decided to start brand new and purchased dustinpetersen.com to use. It was okay blogging over there, but it felt like something wasn’t quite right; I’m not quite sure what it was. I think that part of it was that it felt a little to “me centered” seeing as how the site was my own name and that I didn’t feel able to blog and talk about worship, and music, and God stuff the way I was able to at Shaggy Worshiper.

So!

All that to say that as of now, I’m moving the blog back over to www.shaggworshiper.com. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last month or so and it feels like this is the right thing to do. So those of you who link to, or have dustinpetersen.com in your feed reader, please change it to point to Shaggy Worshiper so you can still keep up with everything going on.

I’ve been able to import all of the content from the other site to here, so all of the videos, pictures, and posts from dustinpetersen.com can now be found here. There might be a few quirks with the imported content like links pointed in the wrong direction, but if that’s the case, let me know via comment or email and I’ll fix it asap. And like any move, it takes a few days to get everything where you want it to really feel like home, so things may change a little bit look and feel wise, but after that it should be in a pretty set.

Welcome back to Shaggy Worshiper.

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I’ve been doing this whole blogging thing for about almost a year now.

I’ve moved homes twice, first on the jump from iWeb to Wordpress.

Then, after I broke shaggyworshiper, the jump from shaggyworshiper to dustinpetersen.

For those of you who have been here since the beginning, thanks for sticking around and putting up with my ramblings.

For those of you who are new around here and maybe this is the first post you read here, I hope that you’ll find something you like here that’s work coming back for.

Here’s to making it to 250.

d

That’s how most acceptance speeches start out. Well, actually, nowadays it’s popular to say, “OhwowItotallydidn’texpectthisI’msocaughtoffguardanddidn’texpecttowinIdon’thaveanything”. They then proceed to start thanking people who have helped them get to where they are, anywhere from parents, to agents, to people they met in the supermarket, to their dentist.

A couple days ago, my blogging and real-life friend, Mindy, gave me an award on her blog for being one of her favorite blogs. In her review and reasons for giving me an award, she said that I do “all the brave stuff” like be on stage in front of people singing, playing guitar, and praying and then ended it by saying someone should give me a record deal (any takers?).

Thinking about this, I realized that I wouldn’t be who I am or doing what I’m doing if it weren’t for the amazing people that are consistently surrounding me, encouraging me, and challenging; you know who you are. I heard a quote one time that said, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you who you are”, and I think that’s true to an extent; we are greatly influenced and affected by those we allow to get close to us. All this to say thank you to my friends and those of you who are closest to me.

Without you, I wouldn’t be who I am
d

I’ve done one blog post this month. I’m not sure why, but I just haven’t had any desire to get on here and write like I had been doing. But I think that this little time away from my corner of the internet is coming to an end and that it’s time for me to get back here and blow off some of the dust that’s been gathering. Let’s see, this few weeks have been pretty mellow with spring break, housesitting, and some serious talk about vision and where things are going. I also gave my testimony at Kairos a week and a half ago which was really good for me to lay everything out like that in a setting like that.

This next month is packed full of stuff for me: I’m gone the next two weekends on both the junior and senior high retreats, the following Thursday is the Maundy Thursday service that I’m leading worship for, then I’m playing guitar on Easter Sunday. After that is the last two weeks of school, including finals week and then the healing prayer seminar at Community Covenant and then after all that, I get to take a deep breath. Please keep me in your prayers for the next month for strength, stamina, and whatever else I might need. I’m going to try to get back in a regular habit of posting here.

Welcome back

Dustin