Once again, I am back with our year end letter. We had a few less
shows this year than the last couple. My count is at 28 shows for
2018. However, it feels like we have done a lot more Sunday morning
shows this year. I don’t know if that means we are becoming more
respectable, or that churches are lowering their standards.
As far as new juggling stuff, we are still working on “Forever” (our
new devilstick routine) and our II Corinthians 12 routine. Looking
back at Christmas letters, I can see that we were working on these
back in 2016. We did make real progress on both routines and have even performed each of them for audiences. I really think the latest
version of the II Corinthians routine (version 6) is going to work.
Hopefully by the end of next year, these should both be in the show,
and we will have some new goals. We did come up with a lot of new
intros these year. We have intros for Father Abraham, Frisbees, and
Bye Bye Bye now. This might not seem like a huge accomplishment, but we have been juggling clubs for nearly 20 years and still haven’t
thought of a way to introduce them.
We performed at Creation again this year, and we even made them a promo video. https://youtu.be/9Y8v7KD_OqI In addition to juggling, Darren also performed as the “Hobo Devil” with the Donut Man. Our biggest new event was probably the Kids’ Cookie Break Fest. We also performed at the Ephrata Christmas Tree Lighting. We made it through the show even though it was cold and dark. Also, I got a chance to try snow meteors instead of water meteors.
I think D vs K turned out really well this year. We did balancing(D)
vs twirling(K). The first round was dancing; Darren’s Hokey Pokey
ladder balance beat my Electric Slide with water meteors. The second round was “Take My Trick” I won by juggling while twirling and Darren balanced a stick while getting squirted by a volunteer. The final round was the fire round. I got Darren to be my unwitting volunteer and hold a box of matches with tongs. I smacked the box of matches with my poi and two matches lit up. That is not a lot of fire, but I liked it and it worked just the way I wanted it to. However,
once again Darren won. He balanced a torch on his hand and did some flips and tosses. I really liked have balancing and twirling go
together. Hopefully, something will come of this.
Finally, it is time for the personal sentence. My wife and I had a baby
girl, Lindsey Marie, and Darren and his wife are expecting their first
child next year.