Last night Joyouswind asked us about The Most Wretched Sound.

It was a good post with some neat responses.  However, I feel it needs a different approach.  Therefore I give you a few of the most beautiful as I hear them.


Helicopter in flight


Airplane engines (jet, turboprop, piston, it doesn't matter)

What do you think are the most beautiful sounds?

This morning I drove down to the new location of the church that I left back in January.  They just moved into this new location a couple weeks ago so I hadn't yet seen the finished product.  I might have just let my interest in what the finished product would wind up looking like fester but I'd been hearing about how great and beautiful it was so my curiousity grew and I had to see for myself (I wasn't finding many pictures online).

I wasn't impressed.

Parts of it looked like a warehouse and other parts of it looked like they were trying for a mountain lodge type atmosphere, while still other parts looked like they were trying to combine art deco and modern and post-modern stylings all in one place.  All of that in only in the large open atrium area right inside the front doors of the building.  It doesn't look too bad as long as you don't look at too much of the space at once.  Also, once you've been in there for a while you begin to get used to it and it sort of works.  So really, after the horrible first impression, it isn't too bad, though I wouldn't say that it ever became good in the hour or so that I was there.  It might have helped if I'd had some better understanding of what they were trying to do with the space as my confusion about that was influencing the rest of my perception.

I didn't get too much of an idea about the auditorium space since there was a service in progress and it was pretty dimly lit and somewhat crowded.  I will say though that it didn't appear to be any bigger than the auditorium at the old location, though I'm sure that will change they do phase 2 of the construction (its supposed to anyway).

I was also struck by how out of the way and hidden the church office is.  The idea of setting things up so that you have to go in the front doors and then around a corner, around an obstruction, into a hallway, through a door, around another corner and then through another door to get to the church offices just doesn't make any sense to me.  I'm sure that setup works great for much of the staff as they write sermons or do paperwork or whatever else they do that doesn't involve actually interacting with people.  I'm also sure that the path to the offices won't seem like much once you've walked it a few times.  However, I can fully see someone stopping in there during the week to drop something off or to meet with a staffer or just to get information about the church and then wandering around for a while until someone sees them and can guide them to their destination.  The guy who was giving me my tour of the facility (maintenance guy) said much the same thing himself about the office setup.