IndyCC

After a break so short I wonder if it even happened, I’m back at Purdue. Today was the first day of classes and I had four of them spaced out between 7:30am and 3:30pm. Some of them are going to be pretty tough (“Advanced Navigation and International Operations”), others continuations of classes from last semester (727 Systems and 727 Operations), one terribly scheduled (Air Transportation overlaps with my cell group, so if I get off the wait list I have to stop leading the group and leave a great group of guys), and a couple should be fairly easy (“Crew Resource Management,” and, drum roll please…BOWLING!!!) Yep, as a continuation of my strategy to take one fun/easy class per semester to get back on campus, I’m taking bowling. Sadly, I don’t think anyone I know is in my section tomorrow morning, but I do know that John Cobb (my oft-sleeping roommate) is in another section.

Here's a quick picture of Sarah (new cousin) and I over Christmas (I talked about her and Sam in my last post):

And here are my parents with Sarah and Sam:

Indy Christmas Conference was AWESOME!!! I wish I could do a recap of everything that happened, but that would take far too long (even with my tendency for ultra-long posts). The speaker was James White; I’d never heard of him before, but he’s got the dynamics of a black preacher (makes sense considering that he is a black preacher) and the theological solidness of John Piper. Yeah, he was really good. And better yet, in what I think was a combination of his dynamic style and a small miracle from God, my massive sleep deprivation never got to me during the conference, so I was able to stay perfectly awake the whole time and take an insane quantity of notes (I didn’t know I could write that small).

I had a great set of roommates (Chip Pollock, Josh Weis, and Tim Six), although we had way too much food in the room. [Side note: I didn’t know Tim before this trip, although I’d heard his name around Mer’dith, but it turns out that he’s a freshman in Flight, so we had a lot in common to talk about.] Our plan was to buy food as a group and eat in the room so that we’d be able to save a bunch of money by not eating at the massively-overpriced food court. Chip kind of coordinated things, saying for me to bring breakfast stuff, he was going to bring sandwich stuff, etc. The problem was that he made two major errors in his directions. First, he told everybody to bring chips/snack-type foods. Second, he didn’t tell anybody quantities. So we ended up with a couple dozen Pop-Tarts and about 20 granola bars from me, plus a couple boxes of cereal that the other guys brought with them, 2 jars of peanut butter (one creamy, one crunchy), 3 squeeze-bottles of jelly (2 strawberry and 1 grape), 2 pounds of turkey, 2 pounds of ham, and 6 loaves of bread, not to mention tons of pop and chips out the wazoo. Yeah, let’s just say that we didn’t go hungry that trip.

A few random notes about the trip:
-Our creative date with one of the girls’ rooms was really fun, although I don’t have time to talk about the details of it (I might be able to talk Chip out of the video and put it on here though; it’s pretty funny).
-A large group of Purdue and IU people went ice skating together on the night of the 30th and there are a lot of pictures from that which you’ll see later.
-Purv (Adam Purvis) and I went to the Indianapolis International Auto Show during a block of free time and had a lot of fun checking out the various sports cars and concept cars around (you can tell we’re from the city in that we had absolutely zero interest in the pickups, where certain friends of mine from Indiana would have spent the whole show). We were most impressed with the Pontiac Solstice, a convertible sports car that looks like it’s around $50k, does 0-60 in 6.5sec, gets 27mpg highway, and comes loaded at about $26k (http://www.pontiac.com/solstice). Basically, it seems to be an excellent compromise between the appeal of a convertible and price.

On the 31st we had a huge dance party with the theme of “Through the Decades” (and some people really went all-out on the costumes for it, kind of scary for certain time periods). Then we met in the main meeting room and prayed in the New Year and had an extended time of worship afterwards. I ended up hanging out with people (including Shane and Kathy, who came just for that night) until around 5am. Then I massively overslept the time I was supposed to meet my ride back to Chicago, so when I woke up I had to frantically pack so they wouldn’t have to wait for me too long.

That’s the short version of the trip, if you want to know more about it you’ll have to ask. I’ve put a photo album with some of the 227 pictures I took up on Facebook, but if you’re not on Facebook you’ll have to look at album on my Flickr site. All the same pictures, but the Flickr one doesn’t have the captions. Here’s the link to that one:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/flyingshawn/sets/1805861/

That’s all for now. I don’t know when I’ll update next (gonna be pretty busy this semester, especially considering I already had homework to do as of 8:30 this morning). Also, I think it should be brought to the attention of my general audience that one person here is absolutely crazy. Apparently, while bored and sick during the break, Amy Chen managed to read the entirety of my blog from when I started it a year ago to now. That’s just nuts!