Good News and the Lost Post

The post that follows was all supposed to be posted Thursday night, but Blogger was down for maintenance when I went to post it and then I forgot that it hadn’t been posted. The one bit of news I want to add to it now (Saturday night) is the fantastic news that happened about 2am this morning: my friend Edgar Williford accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior and Lord. You know what? That’s SERIOUSLY AWESOME!!! (read: God working in amazing and unexpected ways) Praise God!!
Now, onto Thursday’s post:


Here's a riddle for ya:
I went to bed last night at 3:30 am and got up at 5:45 am. How then did I get significantly more sleep than normal?

Think about it, then scroll down...

• If you guessed that the world is moving at a high relativistic speed relative to me, and thus I experience time at a different rate than the rest of you, then you are highly imaginative but also quite wrong.
• If you guessed that I meant I went to bed at 3:30am the day before (aka, Wednesday morning) and got up at 5:45 Thursday morning, that would also be wrong because we all know I had my checkride in that time in the middle.
• The correct answer is that I (inadvertently) took a 5.5 hour nap Wednesday evening.
  

I got back from my checkride, got a large McDonalds chocolate shake (gotta celebrate passing somehow, right?), and was so exhausted from what's turned out to be the busiest 3 days of my semester thus far that I took a nap at 5:45. I was planning on getting up at 6:15 to go meet Natalie, Dustin, and Edgar for dinner, but when my alarm woke me up then I decided I was a) no longer hungry because of the shake, and b) so completely exhausted that I didn't want to do anything but sleep some more. So I set the alarm (or so I thought) for 7:40 so I could get up for cell group. Well, my phone was acting weird that night and decided to let me set the alarm without turning it on! Then the secondary alarm I set must have gotten bumped because that one can be deactivated by hitting the button on the side of the phone. So needless to say I didn't get up then. I didn't wake up again until 11:15pm. As soon as I realized what time it was, I kicked myself for missing cell group, then immediately went over to my leader's room to see what I'd missed. The good news is that I just didn't get the email that cell group was cancelled because of the Creative Date the night before. (I had previously figured it might be, but because I hadn't heard it was cancelled I'd just assumed we were having it). The good news is that I didn't miss anything. Then, being 11:30 at night and having already had 5.5 hours of sleep (which is a normal night's rest for me), I obviously didn't feel like going to bed at a normal time. Thus I surfed the net for a while, copied some video from the date from the camera over to my computer, and watched some Smallville episodes that I had taped on my computer and hadn't yet seen (and a TNG ep. I had on there too). Then I went to bed at, you guessed it, 3:30am.

Moving on...

The Date went very well overall. As I mentioned before, we had problems getting started, causing an awkward half hour where the girls were (very patiently) sitting around waiting for us to get started, but then things really got going. The volume on the TV showing the intro video wasn't very good (even on max), so people had trouble hearing the video, but once we got passed the slightly boring "History of the World Since 2005" 5min lecture, they could hear the audio better and really enjoyed it. Then they went around and introduced themselves, both by real name and game name and talked a little about their character (mainly what they do for a living).

After we started serving the lasagna and gave them their first couple of clues, it was still pretty quiet because nobody was quite sure what they were supposed to be doing, but some of the guys really put in the effort to start a discussion and people picked up on it well. We passed out more clues about every 5 minutes, but some of the clues didn't help any because they weren't yet relevant. For example: one character's alibi was that he was at the movie theater watching Star Wars Episode IX the night of the murder, but because of the timing when we passed out clues, he hadn't yet said that before everybody knew that specific movie didn't open until the next day. After a while, people started suspecting certain individuals, and then it really got interesting. Some people were coming up with wild ideas that I'd never even thought of while planning it (it's actually really fun to see what they come up with when they do that, being one of the two people who actually know the whole plot).

About 20 minutes before dinner ended we turned on the video camera, so when I get the videos ready for being posted online (couple of days, hopefully), you'll be able to see what it was like. Then we had everybody write down who they thought the murderer was on the slip of paper assigning them their seats and turn them in before we adjourned to the TV to watch the ending. Only one person accused the right murderer.

The videotaped murders were the big hit of the night. We showed both the final murder and several alternate endings we'd filmed and people really enjoyed the various silly ways of killing Chip. The reason we had multiple endings was so that the actual murder wouldn't know that he or she was the murderer and would still be suspecting those around them. After the murder we showed the blooper reel, which had a mix of actual bloopers, extra footage, and a few bits where we were just being silly with the camera. Again, another huge hit with the crowd. Right as we were finishing up the blooper reel, my roommates John and Eddie (who aren't in the cell group and weren't part of the date) carried in the limp "dead" form of Chip and set him down on the floor in front of everybody. That reminds me, I still need to show him the videos; he hasn't seen the final product of all our hard work yet.

Anyways, that's about the summation of the Creative Date. Because of how long this post is already, I think I'll save the details of my Instrument Checkride for another day (tomorrow if you're lucky, but otherwise over the weekend or worst case from work on Monday). I'll be getting the videos from the date recompressed and posted as soon as I can, but first I should probably be studying for my exam in Bernie's Commercial Ground class tomorrow morning.