Creative Date #4

If you couldn’t tell from my previous post; last week was pretty insane. I was up past 2:30 in the Meredith lobby studying/paper writing three nights in a row and kept busy during the daytime. Basically I was fried by the end of the week, but at least it was all done. Friday night the Freiburg team had a creative date at Silver Dipper (local ice cream place) so that we could have a chance to all get to know each other and it was a lot of fun. For the game Two Truths and a Lie (where, if you aren’t familiar with it, you share two unusual things about yourself and a third that is false and the group has to figure out which is the lie), I told about the number of visitors who’ve visited this blog, the fact that this is my fifth year in Crusade despite being a junior (with a brief explanation of my time at community college and that I’d been in charge of SCF), and a story of “my” first flight as a student pilot and the excitement therein. Actually, it was the old (and true) tale about the gas cap coming off the Piper Cub on Grandpa’s first flight, but I knew it well enough to pass it off as my own and just about everyone in the group (other than Shane and Chip who weren’t allowed to guess because of how well they know me) guessed one of the other two stories as being false. Ask me sometime about that story if you don’t know it, it’s quite a tale.

Saturday I slept in till 2:30 both because I was utterly exhausted by the previous week and because I wanted to catch up on my sleep before I start pre-conditioning for Freiburg (more on that later). Then that evening we finally had our Creative Date with the O.C. (Off Campus) girls. I say finally because we originally scheduled it for two weeks ago, only to have them cancel at the last minute because only two girls could come that night (the rest were working or out of town). Then in the intervening week the Cary Tuesday Cell Group (led by Johnny and Mike) asked them out for that Saturday (partially choosing that cell group just to get under our skin), but then poetic justice was served because both cell groups had to mutually cancel for last Saturday. In a way it’s good for them that it happened that way, because there had definitely been discussion of how we could, shall we say, “orchestrate” some justice on those guys if it had gone through (although we were only joking on most of the ideas). In the end, Johnny and Mike decided to tag along with my guys on our date with them.

Matt Chupp was in charge of this one and put together a brilliant photo scavenger hunt. I say ‘brilliant’ because he came up with all the ideas for things to find by himself and had some really creative and fun ones. Each item was worth a certain number of points, so finding harder things or going to more distant items would pay off in the end. With 8 guys and 6 girls, we split into three teams (I was with Chupp, Maria Graves, and Misha Early) and spread across campus looking for things like...

A bike with no seat:

A Purdue football player (this one, Alec Huber, is actually in Cru):

Someone vomiting:
(Yes, for the record, it was staged. We ran into Rebekah Macleod outside Harrison and she agreed to spit out some Mountain Dew for this picture)

A couple holding hands (these nice parents visiting their son were kind enough to pose for us):

The Wabash River (we were smart and went to the top of a parking garage to get the shot instead of walking all the way down to the river):

And, in the funniest set of pictures our team got, we went up to a group of three late-20’s adults (two guys and a girl) sitting in the Union and I asked if I could take a picture of the textbook they had sitting on the table for a scavenger hunt. They kindly obliged and then one guy asked what else we needed pictures of. I was planning on moving on, but Maria told them that one of the items was “a couple making out.” The guy we were talking to turns to the girl (who we later deduced was his wife), says “Sorry honey, but I have to,” takes her head in his hands, and plants one! We were roaring with laughter and then he asked if there was anything else we needed. Then he got up on a table and pretended to ride a skateboard so that we’d be able to get another picture for the hunt!



After two hours of trekking all over campus, we all met up at McDonalds and had ice cream while comparing pictures. Sadly, it slipped my mind to get a group picture, but I’d consider that our biggest blunder and everyone had a great time, so I think it safe to conclude the night was a huge success.

Last night at the Freiburg meeting I took a few minutes to brief the team on how to prepare for the jet lag of our flight over there this Friday. My general game plan is to get completely caught up on my sleep deprivation (a strategy that totally failed the last two nights, but I’m hoping to get to bed really early tonight), then start getting up earlier and earlier each morning while still getting 7-8 hours of sleep each night so I can knock 3-4 hours out of the way before we leave. The trick is going to be the trip back, because they say it’s always harder to adjust for jetlag going west and because I have a 7:30am exam Monday morning (we get back to Lafayette late in the evening on Sunday). The good side of that is that my body will be messed up in the right direction for me to be awake for that exam rather than trying to sleep.

As a side note, because of the way everything’s worked out, our team will have to split into two groups for the trip back to the US at the end of the trip. 11 people will be flying from Frankfurt to New York JFK and then to Indianapolis from there, while three of us (Travis, Emily, and I) will be leaving about 20 offset from the other group from Frankfurt, flying to Atlanta, and then onto Indy (we should beat the other group to the Indy airport). One of the nicest perks of that route is that I’ll have my first ride on a Boeing 777 across the pond (pretty much the best airliner in the sky), while the majority of the team will be on a 767 (which is what we’re all taking on the flight to Europe). Hopefully I’ll be able to sweet-talk my way into the cockpit in Frankfurt and meet the crew while the rest of the plane is still boarding (too bad the days of an open-cockpit during cruise are long over).

Anyways, I came across some great video links while surfing today (all from Google Video), so enjoy!

This first one is from the National Archives and Records Administration and is 14 minutes of a documentary on Apollo 11. It has a lot of footage that I’ve never seen before, so I thought it was pretty cool:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4166049933953240830&q=type%3Agpick

I’m beginning to think my Dad should have gotten one of these instead of his new scooter (which I consider to be more of a motorcycle with a different seating position than a scooter because of how powerful it is). Reviewed on Top Gear (one of my new favorite shows) and 20,000 British Pounds (~35,000 USD), the Ariel Atom:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6514168251893889573

A short clip from the Discovery Channel on the largest nuke ever detonated (I’m sure larger ones have been built without being tested, but it’s still huge):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2046393742348211186

Kids, don’t try this at home, but if you ever need to jury-rig a self defense weapon from things in the garage, you might want to consider one of these:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-699057137694538363

For you fans of The Simpsons, someone went to a ton of work and managed to reproduce the entire theme song, shot for shot, with live actors:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2231271827736577327

Finally, I don’t know if I should categorize this as cute or just hilarious, but here’s the Star Wars Baby:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2226508347233603434&q=the+simpsons