​​Hello once again. It is time for the yearly recap. We made it through the year, but I don't feel like we have much new to report. We did the exact same number of shows as we did last year, 27.  The two notable new shows that I can think of are Oregon Dairy's Warehouse Theatre and Corn Cob Acres. Corn Cob Acres had us for two shows this year, so it seems like between them, Weaver's, and Cherry Crest our fall weekends are going to be filling up fast going forward. While our new costumes, logo, and "ers" flag all made their debuts near the end of last year, this was the year that we really started using them. Similarly, my ukulele song, "I Like to Juggle Just Two," was written last year, but this year we started actually doing in the show. The goal was to make a music video with audio good enough to be played on Kid's Cookie Break. Though various things went wrong on the day of filming, we did film it, and I think I'll be able to put together a music video from the clips sometime in the next month or two. The one truly new thing from this year is that we now have ...

 a DKers tablecloth!!

We did not do a D vs K this year, but fortunately my son Everett was willing to fill the void and challenged me to a couple of rounds of E vs K.  I think my main take away from these was that guessing game type routines worked really well. I don't know if these would work in a big setting or only for audiences of less than ten people. We do have a couple of new things we're working on for the future. We are trying to put Darren's four cigar box tricks in the show. Right now, the idea is to combine them with a magic trick, so he will be using playing cards just like he does for three cigar boxes. Also, we started learning some club replacement tricks at the Pocono Juggling Fest. We have about six new tricks, hopefully we'll come up with a few more and start working on a routine soon. Finally, I wrote an outline for a potential new show. Darren has read it and has said neither yes nor no.

After three years, Darren has finally finished building his upstairs closet  (no one really cares if a closet has trim, right?). My wife and I had our fourth child Lucy May.

Greetings,

Check it out, our year end recap letter is actually posted before the end of the year. This year we did 27 shows and tried out more new stuff than we have in the last five years. Part of the productivity this year was due to my goal of doing one tangible DKers thing each week. I think was able to do it, but a large part of that was learning that if you have a tangible goal for a busy week it is fairly easy to cut that goal in half and make it two small goals that are still tangible things that you can point to. I still have a lot of DKers things I could do. It turns out doing a lot of things doesn't make your to-do list shorter, it makes it longer.  Still, trying to do something every week did have an effect. However, I think tangible goals may be overrated. Example, one of my weekly goals was to shellac my hat to make it stiffer. This was an easy goal and didn't take much time, but it is easy to imagine myself getting distracted and fiddling around with my hat for a half hour instead. My question is, when it comes to juggling, which is better? Would I rather see a juggler who fiddles around with his hat for a half hour or one who is good a getting stuff done? Anyway, while there are lots of things we want to do next year, I do not have a specific goal going into the year. 

I have had this goal of a juggling ukulele song for a while, and I am just about to start working on song idea number 3. I thought I would like to keep a record of the old ideas, so here is the archive of juggling ukulele songs. Hopefully I won't have to add too many more songs to this post.

Greetings once again,

This year felt like kind of a return to the status quo. I mean that as both a positive and a negative. I worry that I might get sad and introspective with this years Christmas letter, but that's ok since it is mostly for future me to read.  This year we didn't work on a lot of new stuff, but we performed 24 shows. Of the 24, four of them were bad, which means 20 times everything worked well, but I am not going to talk much about those shows. 

Greetings,

I am back again with our year end letter. We started out this year with the idea that instead of trying to get new routines into the show we would focus on just adding little tricks into our routines. We got off to a fast start and came up with three new tricks to add into our first show this year. We changed the ending of Joyful. We juggled four big balls while I am laying on the ground(this trick is a victory for D vs K since I was able to learn my part as part of D vs K 2019). Finally, we came up with a quick 5 ball trick we call Lofty.

We also started working on a new Easter message.  I bought the new props and wrote a version of script (Darren approved, but I was lukewarm on it). However we never tried it out because all our Easter shows were canceled. Lots of shows were canceled this year due to the pandemic. We finally met up late in June to work on video for Marian and Friends. The result can be found here. Seeing Darren and juggling again was so exciting after the time off, that I found myself yelling most of time.  We went on to do 4 more outside shows this summer.  Surprisingly, we ended up performing "Prodigal Fun" two times even though we didn't do it at all last year.

We did D vs K online this year. I won, but I won't do a recap since you can still watch it here.  I was super happy with the way everything turned out except for the fact that we only got 34 people to vote and two of them were my dad.  We actually liked doing it this way enough that we are going to try to do it online again next year.  I haven't seen Darren since our last show in September, but I am pretty sure that whenever we meet up to practice, my excitement will be such that I will have trouble controlling the volume of my voice.

Finally, the personal sentences: My wife is pregnant with our third child. Darren appears to still be sane and well despite watching unbelievable amounts of Thomas the Tank Engine with his son.​

I have answers, but I am just putting up questions for now, so Darren has a chance to respond to the questions instead of my answers.

Question 1: What should the structure of the show be?

Possible Structures:  
A) Like Themes; some sort of gimmick that lets you go through some sort of list
I see this all the time. Brett Meyers' show is like this, most of the shows at Sesame Place are like this, lots of kid's books are like this. (I am sure there are lots of other examples, but that is most of the media that I consume right now). There are endless ways to do this. Olympics, each event is a routine, Awards show, each category is a routine, I don't want to be a juggler anymore each replacement job is a routine(this is PJ Funnybunny)

B) Like Prodigal, we narrate a Bible Story. This is pretty self expanatory.

C) Something else, 
I don't know what the something else would be. I imagine that we would think of a thing we wanted to say or do, and make up a story that allowed us to say or do that thing. Example: Back in college I did a short show with my friend Nate. He said he wanted to write his number on a ball and give it to a girl in the audience, so the whole show built up to that. 

I really enjoyed making Prodigal Fun, and that style of show would be fun and natural for me to write again. That being said I don't think we should do that again, I think it works better if we are the characters of the story instead of the narrators. Between A and B, I would pick A.  However as always, my preference is something new. I don't know what the something else would be. I imagine that we would think of a thing we wanted to say or do, and make a story that allowed us to say or do that thing. Example: Back in college I did a short show with my friend Nate. He said he wanted to write his number on a ball and give it to a girl in the audience, so the whole show built up to that. Trying to think of a thing I would like to say, led my to Question 2

I have no thoughts.

Question 2: Any idea on what the message of the show should be?

I don't think this is actually a good idea for the show, but the point of K Anything is basically to have a place to put ideas that don't really have a place to go.  A thing I like to talk about with Darren is Professional vs. Amateur. Here are prior posts on this: Professional and Lower Case K (I might be missing one). The thing I like about this idea is that Darren and I can actually disagree, and the audience could pick sides. We could each pick Bible stories to go with our points. I don't know what the pro-professional would be, probably something like run the race to win the prize kind of a thing. My first thought on the anti-professional is Jesus washing the disciples feet. I like the idea of retelling it and having Peter's response be rolling his eyes and yelling, "Come on! Can't we keep this thing professional" I could go on, but I don't see this actually being a juggling show.

I have no thoughts


Question 3: Do you have any interest in having more merchandise? (Juggling props, kits, coloring pages, etc?)

People have asked about us selling juggling props or kits. I don't really want to do this, we already have too much stuff to transport and keep track of. I am sure I would get into making a instructional video to go along with a kit, but there are other things I'd rather do. Some of the stands at the Creation Kid's Tent have coloring pages. It would be fine to make some of those, but I can't really see us using them for very many events.

I have no thoughts

​

​Greetings,

Another year in the books. Although we only had around 25 shows(update from D 26), I would say it was definitely our busyest year ever. I think rather than judging busyness on what we did, we should judge it on what we didn't do. We definitely turned down more shows this year (because we were too busy) than ever before. We are getting a lot of repeat shows now. We even made returns to Intercourse Heritage Fest and Cherry Crest Farm after a few years off. Also, we did 6.5 Christmas shows. The half show was a practice at Hinkletown that was viewed by a group that was renting the gym. (Show number 6 was a Christmas show at Creation) Our most notable new show was probably a show at Kitchen Kettle.

We have performed our new devilstick routine "Forever" a bunch this year, and it is on its way to becoming a normal routine instead of just a new thing we are trying. We haven't really done the II Corinthians routine all year, but we haven't given up on it yet.  We did a highly modified version of it for a Sunday morning show where they wanted us to do something on David and Jonathan. It was fun to try something a little different, but I don't think we will be doing a David and Jonathan routine again.

I broke Darren's two year winning streak and won D vs K this year. The first round was three three ball finishes. I won this round decisively. I don't think Darren really practiced for this, but he did do a butt grab a la Jason Garfield. I did a neck catch, a spin move, and a foot catch. Round 2 was expanding a existing routine. I added a magic high five to our foundation routine, and Darren knocked a carrot out of his mom's mouth while we were passing around her. I thought this could have gone either way, but the judges gave this to me as well. We have used both these things in other shows since then, so I view this as a win for the whole D vs K concept. The final round was most extreme trick. I did three big balls on my back sort of. Darren balanced his son Cameron on his hand. Even though I had already won the judges gave me this round as well.

One final thing new thing from this year, we made a promotional video for Creation this year. I don't think a lot of people saw it, but I liked how it turned out, and I feel like I am finally figuring out how to make/edit videos.

By the way, Darren had a son this year, and he is healthy and crawling around. Kevin's daughter is now running around and his son spent a lot of the year pretending to be Darren.