Think Fast, Fly Faster

I'm Not Dead (but give me a week or so...)

2008-03-05T18:19:00.002-05:00

Unfortunately, I won't be able to give you guys much of an update about what's going on, but the long and short of it is that I lost my job, was unemployed for almost two months, and am now starting ground school for another airline. For the moment, I'm not going to say who my new employer is, due to the fact that saying as much would give away my location and potentially spoil the latest mischief I have up my sleeve, but I'm now living in yet another hotel in yet another city I've never been to before. I'll be here for another 2.5 weeks and then have some time off (don't know how long yet, they haven't made our schedules, but it could be anywhere from two days to two months) before heading to the simulator. Ground school is shorter here than at Big Sky (3 weeks vs. 4), but covers the same amount of material, so I have to study that much harder.

That's about it for now, I really wish I had time for more of an update, but I really need to hit the books. Our first test is on Friday, our second one is Monday, and the third is coming up next Saturday, so it's a pretty accelerated pace. Here's a picture I took the other morning of the airplane I'm going to be flying in the near future (you have to admit, it's a much better looking bird than Big Sky's Beech 1900D's):

My Favorite Superbowl Ad

2008-02-04T00:05:00.000-05:00

This one had me cheering.

By the way, please be praying for me over the next few days, I have my interview with Piedmont Airlines at 7:00am on Thursday. I'm studying hard (trying to, at least), but I have a feeling I'll be nervous regardless of how well I'm prepared. If I get hired, I'll start training on March 4th. Thanks!

Jumpseating Adventures

2007-11-28T10:58:00.000-05:00

(The following post was originally started on Saturday, November 3^rd and finished on the 17^th, but I haven’t hardly been online over the last couple of weeks and thus haven’t gotten around to posting it.)

You know you’ve been watching too much Seinfeld and it’s wayyy too early to be up in the morning when you start coming up with a Jerry Seinfeld’s standup-esque series of jokes while you’re in the shower about something completely mundane about everyday life (which is his trademark style of jokes). Once again, I’m up entirely too early (especially for a Saturday) sitting in the airport waiting for a flight (it’s presently 5:23am).

To recap the last week, I made it back to Billings after visiting Mimi about 10:30 at night. It was a really good visit, but overall the process of traveling there and back ended up being an over 20 hour day, so I was exhausted when I got back. The good news is that the last flight of the night, United put me in the exit row of a 737-500 (which is technically part of the Economy Plus section, which has extra leg room). But, instead of being the typical 5 extra inches that most of the Economy Plus section contains, this exit row had the most leg room I’d ever seen in any airplane (even first class). Sitting in my seat, I could stick my leg straight out in front of me and still have 5 inches of space between my heel and the back of the seat in front of me! Needless to say, it was a nice change of pace from the cramped Coach or even-more-cramped jumpseats I usually end up sitting in. Anyway, Sunday I took a really long walk (which I’ll get to in a minute) and then started sitting on Reserve on Tuesday.

Reserve is essentially being on-call in case a pilot gets sick, runs out of duty time, can’t make it to a flight, etc. On the days that I’m scheduled to be on reserve, I have to be available to answer my phone from 7am to 7pm. They’re required to call me at least one hour before I have to show up for the flight (and I have to call back within 15 minutes if I miss the call), so I’ve made a habit of getting up so that I’m actually reasonably awake by the time 7 rolls around. They’ll usually just give me a couple of legs when they call instead of a whole multiple-day trip, but I want to be fairly awake in case they give me an overnight or two so I don’t have to go crazy trying to get up and pack on really short notice.

Anyway, I was on reserve from Tuesday through Friday this week, but didn’t have to fly at all. They almost had me fly a couple of flights on Tuesday, but ended up not needing me because they had someone volunteer to pick up extra flights and they needed someone else to take a flight in order to do a Line Check (a routine check of captains required by the FAA). The annoying thing about being on reserve and not flying is that I have to stay close to the Rimrock in case they call, so I’m liable to go stir-crazy from being trapped there all the time (can’t even go up to the Rim because if they call while I’m up there I won’t have enough time to get back, get ready, and get up to the airport within an hour).

Now I have a couple of days off before I start reserve again on Monday, so I’ve decided to jumpseat to Minnesota to visit my grandparents and uncle and aunt (and my cousins) because I won’t get to see them over Christmas like I normally do.

OK, let’s jump ahead a couple of weeks. I was in the midst of typing out the post you’ve just been reading when something happened to interrupt me (I think it was time to board the plane to Minnesota) and I simply never got back to writing it. It’s now been a busy two weeks since the above text was written. Quick recap:

-The trip to Minnesota was great, I really enjoyed seeing the family and I had no problems getting back to Billings on time. I even had the opportunity to go to the Mall of America to pick up Shane’s birthday present (abit a little belated). The downside was that it took Sarah and Sam (the cousins, 3 and 2 years old respectively) most of the time I was there to warm up to me because it’d been so long since they’ve seen me (I don’t think Sam was even able to remember who I was). Still, they eventually warmed up to me and we had a lot of fun.

-I finally got to do some flying that week. I was lucky enough to get called to do the Portland trip on Wednesday, which I’d really been hoping for because I wanted to see some of the scenery toward the west (all of my previous flying had been North, East, or South of Billings, which has much less interesting terrain). Our route took us to Helena MT, Missoula MT, and then to Portland OR. Missoula was especially fun because it’s in a valley surrounded by terrain and on the approach I descended between two giant hills that were a mile or so apart, so it was both really fun and terrifying to look out the window and see terrain higher than us a half mile off either wingtip. We were delayed in Missoula due to some fog in Portland and had to fly most of the way there in the clouds, but when we got close to Portland the skies cleared up and we could see Mt. Rainer, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Saint Helens (which had a little puff of steam coming out of it)! Naturally, I was quite excited. The other flight I did was on Friday, which was a quick trip to take a working airplane (and a mechanic with spare parts) up to Wolf Point where a plane had broken down. We then let the crew that was stranded there (and their passengers) take our airplane and keep going on their route while we waited for the mechanic to fix the airplane before we flew it back to Billings.

-Last weekend I flew down to Cincinnati to look for apartments. Josh flew in from Boston to look with me (we’re going to be roommates) and Kathy drove down from Purdue to be our wheels around town. We’ve got it narrowed down to two places and we’re going to sort out which one we’re going to live at when we get back to Cincinnati this coming Monday. Please pray about this, because the one we like better is more expensive by about $50, but we just found out that they have a unit that’s only $20 more expensive available and that someone had already applied for it (as of when I talked with them earlier this week, the application hadn’t yet been approved or denied, so please pray it’s denied so we can get that fantastic deal). On my way back to Billings on Monday, I got stranded in Minneapolis for about 9 hours (the earlier flight to Billings was full, so I had to wait for the late one), so I had Roxy pick me up and I spent the afternoon with my family again. That was especially fun because my last visit was recent enough that Sarah and Sam clearly remembered who I am and warmed up to me very quickly.

-This Wednesday I had an overnight trip to Glasgow which was delayed because of a minor security breach while boarding the plane in Billings. Long story short, a passenger saw that his suitcase was on the cart of bags being bumped until the morning flight (because we were overweight) and managed to dart over to the cart, grab his bag, and get back in the boarding line without being noticed. Then he ripped off the checked baggage sticker and tried to pretend it was a carry-on. Needless to say, this is highly illegal (because you can put a lot of things in checked baggage that you can’t carry on the airplane, like for example, a gun or a bottle of water), so we had to deplane all the passengers, send them back through security, have the guy questioned by the cops, I searched the airplane with a cop, and then we finally departed about an hour late. I don’t think the guy had any malicious intent, but he still got in a lot of trouble and has been fined $2800 for it.

-The good news is that yesterday (Friday) was my last day of reserve in Billings before moving to Cincinnati.

-The bad news is that they gave me an overnight trip last night, so I wasn’t able to catch the early morning Northwest flight that I was hoping for, which brings me up to the here and now…

My plan for the weekend was to catch that Northwest flight to Minneapolis and then hop onto another one from there to Indy, where Kathy would pick me up and drive me up to Purdue. I’d spend the afternoon and evening there and then catch the Sunday morning Amtrak up to Chicago after spending the night in Adam’s room in Cary. Once in Chicago, I’d do laundry and then pack my car before going to bed early in preparation for an early morning departure to Cincinnati. If I make good time, I’m hoping to stop at Purdue for a late breakfast along then way. Then I’ll get to Cinci early afternoon and meet up with Josh so we can sort out which of the two apartments we’re going to go for.So, now that I got stuck with that overnight last night, I’ve had to revise my plans. Because I got back to Billings too late this morning to catch any of the early departures, I’ve decided to hop a ride on the Repo flight in order to get out of here. Big Sky’s airline service out of Cincinnati starts tomorrow (Sunday), but we don’t have an airplane down there yet, so today they’re flying 165YV on a straight non-stop flight from Billings to Cincinnati. If we get there on time, I’m hoping to catch a Delta flight to Indy where Kathy will pick me up as planned. The downside of all of this is that I won’t get to Indy until about 5:30pm (and thus Purdue around 7ish), so the time I can spend with people will be drastically reduced. You might now be asking why I’m even bothering to go to Purdue at this point rather than just going straight to Chicago. I have three primary reasons (numbered according to importance):

3. I’ve already spent $40 on the Amtrak ticket

2. A little time is better than none at all

1. A year ago today I took Kathy to the Silver Dipper ice cream shop after Cru and we officially started “dwaiting.” (for those of you unfamiliar with that term, it was invented by Mike Rose and is essentially a transitional phase of easing into a relationship rather than jumping straight from being friends to dating. If that oversimplified summary didn’t make any sense, ask me and I’ll explain it further) For the record, I don’t count this day as our “anniversary,” I prefer to use that term for the point when we actually started dating, but it’s still an important milestone for us.

One last thing before I finish this really long post spanning the last three weeks; I’m not the only person catching a ride on this reposition flight to Cincinnati. Also on board is Jeff Bost (not sure of his title, I think he’s the Director of Flight Operations), Fred Deleuw (the President of Big Sky Airlines), and Fred’s wife (whose name I can’t remember). That’s been cool for me because I haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet Fred in person (usually he goes and introduces himself to new-hire classes, but he didn’t make it to ours) and it’s been good to be able to get to know him a little. I actually spent the entire first hour and a half or two hours of this flight talking with his wife and learning all about their family, their daughter who goes to Purdue, etc. When she found out how long I’ve been living in the Rimrock, she felt bad for me and said she wished she’d known I was there because she would’ve invited me over for dinner. :) Apparently, Fred had tried to talk Dispatch into letting us stop in Lafayette for fuel, which would have been perfect for me because I’d have just gotten off the plane there and been done with my travelling, but sadly the plane is lightly-loaded enough that we have room to completely fill up the tanks and fly to Cinci nonstop. Oh well.

Anyway, at the moment we’re about an hour from Cinci and in 20 minutes or so we’ll fly right by Purdue, so I’m hoping the clouds below us will clear up so we can spot it as we go by.

If only I had a parachute…

Church With The Mogul #3

2007-11-28T10:53:00.000-05:00

This post was actually supposed to be a part of the post above it (“Jumpseating Adventures”) when I originally started typing it a few weeks ago, but due to the couple-week delay in writing that post I never actually got to the Mogul Church topic, so I’ve decided to go back and write a dedicated post on the topic and just backdate it so that it fits chronologically in with the rest of the posts. (If you haven’t seen any of the “Church With The Mogul” posts before, I’d recommend you go back and take a look at the first one to understand the background of this intermittent series.)

The day after I got back from visiting Mimi, I decided to take a very long walk and continue my attempt to adapt to the fact that I can’t regularly attend church by listening to worship music and a sermon using the MP3 player functions of my phone.

I started out listening to David Crowder’s new Remedy album, which I’d bought a couple weeks prior but still hadn’t gotten around to listening to. It’s good, not quite as good as Illuminate (which I absolutely love), but I still liked it. I think I’m going to grow to like it a lot more after I listen to it a couple more times.

Then I listened to the next installment of Driscoll’s sermon series on the book of Proverbs. The downside of the fact that it’s been so long since I listened to it is that I don’t remember a lot of the points of the sermon itself, but there are a couple of things that stick out in my memory.

The first one is that the topic was the heart, so he spent a lot of time focusing on how God takes our hearts of stone and turns them into hearts of flesh and the importance of the fact that it is God that does this, not our own effort. The other big thing that sticks out in my mind is how Driscoll said he prepared for the sermon. He said that there are roughly 900 references to the heart in scripture (including other terms with the same meaning but don’t necessarily use the word “heart”) and in preparation for his sermon he looked at all 900 references, in context. Needless to say, that’s quite an effort, and I think it showed in the quality of the sermon and the grasp he seemed to have of what he was talking about.

There are a couple other little snippets that I remember from the sermon, but I’m afraid I don’t remember them well enough to elaborate here (besides, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you if you were to actually listen to it yourself). Overall, it was a good sermon and I’m looking forward to continuing the Proverbs series (although I don’t know when I’ll listen to the next one, maybe it’ll be tomorrow while I’m riding Amtrak up to Chicago (see post above)).

Church With The Mogul #2

2007-10-27T11:46:00.001-04:00

Ok, I'm finally taking the time to catch up on blogging a little bit. The quick update on life is that I'm now done with IOE and sitting reserve (basically being on call as a backup in case something happens like a pilot gets sick) here in Billings. Today I'm not on reserve, so I've decided to jumpseat down to Colorado Springs to have lunch with my grandma Mimi and then come back to Billings this evening. At the moment, I'm sitting at gate A1 in Billings at some ridiculous hour of the morning waiting for my flight to Denver.

Anyway, back onto topic: the second installment of my fledging Church With The Mogul series.

Almost two weeks ago (yeah, I'm behind), I listened to another Driscoll sermon on my Mogul because I wasn't able to go to church that morning. Later that day I was supposed to fly my first IOE trip, so I decided that I needed to buy a flight case to carry my required manuals, headset, etc in because I didn't really have anything to carry that stuff in (much less look professional doing so). The store that carried the case I needed was over 2.5 miles away, so the long walk there and back provided a convenient opportunity to listen as I walked (and it was a really amazing morning outside).

I started out turning my heart toward worship by listening to David Crowder's "Illuminate" album. I love that CD because the lyrics of their songs have so much depth and can consistently put me in a more worshipful mood even when my day isn't going so well. My favorite song on the album is "All Creatures, No. 2," their modernization of the classic hymn "All Creatures Of Our God And King" and is one of the best updates of an old hymn that I know of (staying faithful to the original song but also making it more modern stylistically). As a side note: while I was out on that walk I stopped and bought Crowder's latest album (Remedy, I think it's called) because Bob Mann loved it so much he demanded I get it. I still haven't listened to it all yet, but what I've heard so far is pretty good.

Quick update on what's going on in real time: I found out just as they were about to start boarding that the United flight was completely full (when I called United a half hour prior there was still room) and that even though I was first in line for the jumpseat, the guy behind me was with a company that code-shares with United, so he'd be able to bump me out of the seat. I ran (literally) down to the Big Sky gate where they'd just finished boarding 2590 (the flight that goes to Sheridan and then on to Denver) and was able to get on at the last possible minute. The bad news was that even though there was room on the first leg (to Sheridan, WY), the second leg of the flight was almost full, so I risked getting stranded in Sheridan. The good news is that I got lucky when we got to Sheridan and there was room for me on the second leg, so I'm presently sitting in 1A as we cruise towards Denver. I doubt I'll be able to make my original connection to Colorado Springs at 10 though, so I'll have to hope for the 11:20 and have a little less time with Mimi.

Back on topic:
When I got done with the Crowder album, I started my sermon for the day. After that really great sermon on idolatry I raved about in the first post of this series (because nobody left any comments about it, I'm guessing none of you listened to it, so let me take this opportunity to re-plug it as one of the best and most applicable sermons I've ever heard, so I strongly recommend you listen to it), I thought about going back and listening through his whole 1st Corinthians series, but I decided not to based on a recommendation from Fack. J.D. (aka, The Fack) was telling me a few days prior about how he's been listening through Driscoll's series on Proverbs and how much he'd been enjoying it because Fack's spent a lot of time in Proverbs and he thought Driscoll did a really good job with it.

The series is really long (I think over 30 or 40 sermons) and goes through the book topically because of how many passages have similar themes but aren't located next to each other. Not surprisingly, with that much material to cover, Driscoll felt the need to start off with a sermon that was essentially an introduction to the book and some of the overarching ideas before actually getting into Proverbs itself. It was this introduction that I listened to that morning.

Because it was an introduction rather than actually preaching out of a specific text, there wasn't as much that I got out of it as I would from a normal sermon, but it was still a worthwhile listen. Those of you who know me well know that I'd normally frown on not preaching out of a text, but I'm making an exception to that general rule in my mind because there's so much in our culture blocking our ability to understand Proverbs that I really think it was necessary in this case. That brings me to the biggest theme of the sermon that I remember, and that's about the difference between knowledge and wisdom (and how knowledge is so highly valued in our culture and wisdom isn't). One of the single biggest
reasons that he identifies is that our culture is so youth-focused (and is thus highly impatient) and knowledge can be acquired relatively quickly, as opposed to wisdom which takes a lot of time (and thus the wise typically aren't very youthful according to the viewpoint of the culture).

Anyway, like I said, I didn't get as much out of the introduction as I'd hoped, but I am looking forward to the rest of the Proverbs series (I'll probably listen to the next one tomorrow morning). It sounds like we're beginning our descent into Denver, so I think I'll call this post done and focus on making my connection (don't worry, I won't email this post in to Blogger until we're back on the ground). Please pray that the rest of my travels go well today and that I'm able to make it back to Billings tonight after seeing Mimi.

Checkride Done!

2007-10-16T01:25:00.000-04:00

Ok, I’m really tired; I’m in Sheridan, Wyoming overnighting on my first trip flying with passengers and I don’t think I’ll be able to write all that I hoped to tonight (my checkride, the second installment of my Church With The Mogul series, and talking about this first IOE trip I’m on), so I think I’ll just do the first part and write the others over the next couple of days.

Thursday night (well, technically Friday morning, I’ll get to that in a second) I finally got to finish my aircraft training. They told us that we were going to have a plane at 9pm, but then called us in the afternoon and said we’d been pushed back to 11. The plan was for Rich to do an ILS approach to finish up his training, then have Rachel and Ashley each do a trip around the pattern to get their required night landing, and then finally to have John and I finish or at least get closed to done. Around 12:30am, we were done with Rich, Rachel, and Ashley, so we stopped to let them out and take a short break, then John and I headed out. John has me beat on seniority, so he got to fly first while I got to sit in the back and try to stay awake, then I finally got my turn at 2:30. It went ok, but I was definitely relieved to finally get done flying and get to bed about 4:15 in the morning (ironically, just as I was about to go to bed, I looked at the lappy and noticed on my instant messenger that Kathy was no longer idle, having gotten up to start her day about 45 minutes prior, so I said good morning before hitting the sack).

Later Friday afternoon I got a call saying that my checkride was going to be at noon on Saturday, so I quickly got to work trying to figure out if they were going to give me time off before IOE and I could go home or if I was going to just stay in Billings (or, worst case, they were to decide to send me to Boston for IOE). I couldn’t get a definitive answer out of Crew Scheduling, so I decided to gamble on the side of being able to go home and packed up my stuff (quite an undertaking, because I’ve settled in at the Rimrock and bought all that food). I packed most of my stuff to take home with me (hoping to leave a good sized chunk of the stuff I no longer need behind when I return) and gave the rest to Kevin to keep in his apartment while I was gone. Then when it was time to leave for the checkride I just left my key in an envelope at the front desk (so they could check me out if I left or just give it back to me if I didn’t) and took all my luggage up to the airport with me so I’d be ready to go.

The checkride itself went pretty good, though I made a few mistakes (landing with the yaw damp on was the big one), but hey, a pass is a pass. The bad news is that right after the checkride I got an email from Crew Scheduling saying that I’d be starting IOE the next day, so no trip home for me (but at least I get to do it here in Billings!). They told me that my first IOE trip would be the 66-90, which is a three day trip that heads out to Sidney, Montana the first day and then spends the next two days shuttling between Denver, Colorado and Sheridan, Wyoming (with a 24 hour layover in Sheridan where I am now). I’ll tell you more about that another time, for now I’m gonna hit the sack and try to get rested for Day 3 tomorrow, which is the longest day of this trip. Goodnight everyone!

Phantom Vibrations

2007-10-11T01:10:00.000-04:00

No way! I never realized that I'm not the only one who experiences this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21226227/

Yeah, it really happens to me on a regular basis. Because my phone usually resides in a pocket next to my right thigh, that's the spot I occasionally feel a phantom vibration (I also occasionally feel it higher up on my right side where the belt-holster holds it against a bone). I also have been known to think it's vibrating and reach for it to answer a call before it actually starts vibrating or ringing.

In other news, I still haven't flown any this week. Chris got done with his checkride today, so he's done except for IOE. John and I are supposed to go flying tomorrow night, so we'll see if it actually happens or not. the company hasn't decided if I'm going to do IOE here in Billings or out in Boston, but I hope it's here because I'm already settled in here at the Rimrock (unpacked/have food/used to the area/etc). For those of you who can't remember what IOE is (which seems to be everyone, which is kinda annoying when the people I talk to a couple of times a week need it explained again every time), it's my first 20 hours flying with passenger where they pair me with a specially-trained captain who can help me get the hang of actually flying the line and learn the kind of stuff you can't learn in the classroom. After that I'll be sent to my domicile and finally be done with training.

Anyway, that's it for tonight, I'm gonna get to bed at a reasonable time tonight. 'night everyone!

Lost Day

2007-10-07T21:07:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone, sorry I haven't posted in a while, it's just kinda slipped my mind over the last few days (and there hasn't been a whole lot to write about).

Yesterday night, I had my first flight at the controls of the real airplane. They called us up in the afternoon and most of the pilots here for aircraft training had to show up at the airport at 8:45 because we had a plane from 9 onwards. Unfortunately, this meant I had to miss the end of the Purdue vs. Ohio State game (which wasn't going so well anyway, but I did miss our only touchdown of the evening) and instead spend a few hours sitting in the back of the plane while others were flying. I finally got my chance to fly around 12:15 and did one trip around the pattern (the goal was to complete a night landing and do most of the rest of my training during the day). It went ok; the plane definitely flies and lands better than the sim, but I wasn't expecting the power levers (throttle to you non-pilots) to be so much more sensitive than in the sim.

We finally got back to the hotel about 1:45 and I got to bed about 2:30, glad that I was going to be able to sleep in. Before you bash me for sleeping in instead of going to church, you have to understand that I'm on call 24/7 right now, so even if I could get to church it would not be fun to have to pull my ride out of sunday school or service if my phone rang. They told us last night that there was going to be a plane available from noon to 6pm today, but also that only the captains should plan on flying (they didn't think they'd have time to fit us F/O's in).

So, I slept in until about 11:30, took my time getting up, and was looking forward to a nice relaxing day (was planning on having church with my phone again by listening to some more worship music and another Driscoll sermon, taking with Kathy and Dan Willman, an old friend who called me out of nowhere last night, doing some video editing, etc) when my phone rang at 12:20 while I was in the shower. It was John (one of my classmates) saying that we have a plane and we're leaving for the airport in 5 minutes. Naturally, I wasn't too happy, but that didn't change the fact that I suddenly had to frantically get dressed, grab my flight stuff, throw a book and some snacks into my gear (made the mistake of being stuck in the back with nothing to do for a few hours the night before), and rush downstairs to meet my ride up to the airport.

It's now 5:50 and I'm still sitting in the back and haven't gotten any chance to fly, which means they really didn't need to have me come up here anyway. Oh well. At least I brought some stuff to do up here (read my Bible, did a little reading in a book Shane is lending me, reviewed some of my flight study materials in case I got a chance to fly, and I'm finally blogging a little from the Mogul (in Flight Mode, of course, I'll send this after we get back on the ground). I guess on the plus side, even though I didn't get to listen to that Driscoll sermon, I did end up spending some more time in the Word than I would have according to the original plan.

I don't know what I'll be doing this evening yet, but food is definitely on the agenda, seeing as how all I've had to eat today is a couple granola bars and a Snickers. I'll probably spend the rest of the time relaxing a little and hopefully talking to Kathy and Dan if they're available.

Well, I think we're about to land for the last time (finally!), so I think this is a good time to sign off. Later everyone!

Good News

2007-10-02T11:56:00.001-04:00

Good news, I found out last night that Big Sky doesn't want me to travel today probably Wednesday, which means I get to stay at Purdue an extra day! Sorry, gotta go, I don't have time to type any more now, later everyone!

Stuck Midway To Indy

2007-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry that I haven't posted in a couple of days, I'm sure you were getting used to my daily posts while I was at the sim. Tuesday I decided to skip blogging for a day and use my small amount of useful free time (we had a lot of free time, but most of it was spent being too tired to do anything) talking with my lovely girlfriend and Wednesday I was busy packing and preparing for my checkride Thursday morning.

I was a little scared going into the checkride this morning because my last training flight on Wednesday went absolutely terrible. Fortunately, it proved to be a lot like other times when I've had my last practice flight before a checkride not go well and then the checkride goes unusually well. Yep, you read that right, I passed. I made a number of small mistakes along the way, but they were the sorts of mistakes they expect from someone who hasn't actually flown the plane or operated on the line with the company.

They don't know how long it'll be before a plane is available to do aircraft training back in Billings, so they're letting me go home (well, Purdue, which is really home as much as Chicago is for me) for a few days. Unfortunately, all the flights direct to Indy were booked solid, so I decided to take Southwest and connect through Midway airport in Chicago (and yes, you can groan now, the bad pun in the title was intentional).

What I didn't know when I decided to take that pair of flights was that there's a line of thunderstorms on the east coast causing havoc for the air traffic system across the country. This means that my flight to Indy has been delayed from its scheduled 9:00pm departure to, well, we still don't know, it's 11pm now and the're saying we'll leave at 12:25am. They plane is supposed to be coming in from Washington Dulles and I'm *hoping* that it's finally on its way here.

I was going to get picked up by Amy Chen when I arrived, but it's simply gotten too late for her. Fortunately, as I was sitting at the gate waiting for my endlessly delayed flight, I struck up a conversation with a gentleman sitting near me who was wearing a Purdue polo shirt and using a laptop with a big Purdue logo on it. As we talked, I learned that he is a retired banker who's made a name for himself at Purdue by being the unofficial photographer of the Marching Band (and whom I've heard Amy Schott mention on a couple of occasions). As it turns out, he's going to rent a car when we get to Indy and drive up to Lafayette (assuming Hertz stays open for him like they've promised) and he's willing to give me a ride. I'm still going to have to get Amy Chen to wake up and come pick me up from the far side of town at some terrible hour of the morning, but at least she's not going to drive all the way to Indy and back really late.

Ok, they just said the plane is finally flying (I took a little break from thumb-typing) and it should arrive about 12:20, which means we'll probably leave about 12:50 and get in at about 2:30 (accounting for the time difference).

Ugh, I'm just tired at this point. It's been a very long day and I've got quite a way to go before it's over. I amost wish I'd just stayed the extra day in Greeley and gott there Friday morning, but on the flip side I'd have spent the whole time asking myself if I could've made it tonight. I also had the opportunity when I first got here to have my parents drive my car for me, but I never thought we'd be *this* delayed (and then I'd have had the problem of having to drive the car back to Chicago when it came time to leave again).

I guess that's it for tonight; I'm exhausted and I want to say my battery for later when I need to keep Shane updated on my progress and get Amy to come get me. 'night all.

A Cold, Rainy Day In Greeley

2007-09-24T23:49:00.000-04:00

Today I figured out what I forgot when I was packing to come here; an umbrella (not that I could have fit it in anyway). Not only was it raining this morning, it was also the coldest day we’ve had so far (high of 58), so it was the perfect day to leave the house without an umbrella and forgetting to grab my coat before we left.

In better news, they finally decided what they’re going to do with me. Eric, our new sim instructor, decided to rotate us over the course of 6 hours like we thought he might do, but he also decided to be nice and let the third guy each rotation take a break instead of making him sit in the back of the sim bored for two hours. This is good both because each of us gets a break, but also because it means I get to continue getting experience as Pilot Monitoring, which will help me later on when I get out on line. My understanding is that they’re also planning on keeping me on the same schedule with regard to my checkride, so I’ll be having it Thursday morning (one of the other guys is going to have to stick around an extra day to be PM for me even though they’ll be done on Wednesday). I also found out that the person giving me the checkride will be Dusty, who was one of our ground instructors back in Billings. My air work was definitely a little better today than it was on Saturday, but I still have a ways to go before I’ll be ready for the checkride (which, being only two lessons away, is getting a little close for comfort), so please be praying I continue to improve at an acceptable rate over the next two days.

We still don’t know much of anything about what’ll happen after the sim. My guess is that they’ll want us to hightail it up to Billings so that we’re available to do our training flights in the real aircraft whenever planes become available (I’ll basically be on 1-hour call until that’s done). But there’s a chance they’ll decide to put the emphasis on getting the captains done and give us a few days off until they think we’d actually get to fly (the odds aren’t really in my favor, but pray anyways). If I get really lucky, they’ll decide to give us some time off before sending us up to Billings, which means I could be home as early as Friday.

Don’t worry, I won’t put any spoilers here, but we just got done watching the season premier of Heroes and it’ll be interesting to see where they take it this time around. I hope they’re able to keep it as entertaining and unpredictable as the first season (which Eddie, Adam, and I all found highly addictive). Because of the weirdness with how they handle TV schedules around here (delaying broadcasts but keeping the normal times in the commercials), we ended up also watching the premier of Chuck because it was on at the time we thought Heroes was going to start. Even if the show doesn’t really go anywhere, I have to admit that I found the amount it parodied things like Geek Squad and Firedog absolutely hilarious (and I know just enough people who should be working those sorts of jobs that the rampant stereotyping in the show is that much funnier). Right now, Chris and John are in the other room watching the premier of Journeyman (which I saw on the plane back to Chicago last week), a show that I think might turn out to be pretty good.

I’m hoping to post a video or two from my trip to Purdue last week on here sometime soon (and the instructions for Fried Spaghetti that Roxy asked for a couple of posts ago), but I’m afraid that won’t be tonight. I didn’t sleep all that well last night and I’m going to have to get up relatively early again for sim tomorrow morning (even though he’ll probably brief us for 15 minutes and send me home for another two hours, I still have to be there and awake). Please pray for good sleep so that my ability to learn in the sim won’t be hampered by being tired.

Ok, that’s it, goodnight everyone!

Church With The Mogul

2007-09-24T01:56:00.000-04:00

One of the unfortunate facts of my chosen career is that I’m going to have to miss church a lot. Between being literally unable to go (like today, when I had no way to get to a church from the Aims Community College campus) and having to work most weekends (which will be the case when I actually get out on the line and start flying), I won’t be able to regularly participate in a church for the foreseeable future. This is going to be especially hard after seeing the way that God has worked in my life through the Evangelical Covenant Church in Lafayette during my four years at Purdue.

Eventually, once training is over and I finally get stationed somewhere, I’m hoping to get involved in a church that has a lot going on during the week so that I can still be actively in fellowship with the body despite my erratic schedule. Until then (and during the weeks I’ll be stuck working on Sundays), I’m working on figuring out what I can do to lessen the impact of not being able to go to church.

While there’s simply no substitute for the fellowship that comes from meeting together with the body of Christ on a regular basis, I’ve managed to identify some ways that I can have something of a “church service” while I’m away. Today, I essentially had "church" during a very long walk around the campus of the college using the MP3 features of my phone (an HTC Mogul, hence the name of this post) to listen to worship music and a recorded sermon.

I started out by turning my heart towards worship by listening to (and at times singing along with) music from Stephen Hinkle’s album “Come.” For the 1 or 2 of you who’ve never heard me rave about Stephen, he was the worship leader at Precept Ministry’s Teen Boot Camp the years that I attended there in high school and quickly became one of my all time favorite worship leaders because of the depth of his music (containing real depth and honoring God for who He is rather than being catchy with little meaning like a lot of modern “worship” music) and his attitude towards leading worship in a corporate setting (he regularly talks about the importance of being a “lead worshiper” rather than a “worship leader). Basically, God has regularly ministered to me through his music over the last six years or so and I’m really looking forward to his long-promised third album, which I’m hoping will come out before Christ gets back.

Then I re-listened to one of the most applicable and convicting sermons I’ve ever heard in my life (Mark Driscoll’s “Resisting Idolatry Like Jesus,” from his series on 1st Corinthians). It’s one of those sermons that after you listen to it, you really have to sit down and think through a lot of the areas of your life because it’s so convicting and directly applicable to life in our culture. Essentially the main idea is that basically all of the sins we deal with are primarily idolatry problems, where we take a good thing (frequently things that God has given us, like our friendships, families, ministries, house, etc) and elevate it to a god-thing, placing it at a level of esteem in our lives far above where it should be. Naturally, that little explanation can’t nearly do justice to an hour-long sermon, but at least you have some idea of what it’s about. If you want to listen to it (which I HIGHLY recommend), go to http://media.marshillchurch.org/ and use the menu in the grey boxes to navigate to Sermons => Books of the Bible => 1st Corinthians and then scroll down the page to “Resisting Idolatry Like Jesus.”

Then I finished my “church-time” with a substantial amount of time thinking and praying about that sermon and sorting out with God how it applies to my life.

So…why did I spend all this time telling you about all of this? Well, one, this was intended to be a relative short post and it got long (and this is the shortened version, because I was sorting out my thoughts a lot more as I originally was typing it), and two, I think it might be cool and a worthwhile use of this blog if I were to occasionally talk about the things I’m thinking about and learning as I improvise “church” during the times like today where I’m unable to actually attend one.

In other news, they’re still figuring out exactly what to do with me as far as the simulator goes. We thought they were going to put us all in the box for 6 hours a day and just rotate seats every two hours (with the third guy observing the other two fly), but now it looks like they’re going to keep the other two on their current schedule and then alternate having each of them sit as the second crewmember for me two hours a day. While I suppose this is good in the sense that we’re not all in the sim for 6 hours straight, it’s not very good for me because I’ll only be getting practice at being the “Pilot Flying” (PF) for two hours a day verses the original schedule of two hours as PF with Melanie being “Pilot Monitoring” (PM) and then switching seats and being the PM for her for another two hours. Our exam at the end of the sim time only actually tests our skills as PF, but I wish I could get that extra experience as PM because I’ll need it when I actually get out on the line. Ok…I just talked with the other two guys, and apparently the latest news is that the instructor talked with John again and said some things that could be interpreted as wanting me to come in for that 6 hour block like we originally thought, but John wasn’t really clear what he meant, so I’m gonna play it safe and get up to go with them at 8:40 just in case he wants me there at the earlier time.

One last thing before I go to bed…I have yet another cool link for you guys! I have to be very careful with this one, because it’s one of those fascinating things that could easily cause you to lose a couple hours of time. Here’s the description of it straight from Blogger.com:

“Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching. Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, ‘so, when are you launching this?’ “

Well, they finally released it and I seriously lost a half hour today watching it, it’s just that fascinating. (As a side note, they incorporated filtering technology into it (like Google’s SafeSearch algorithms), so the pictures should be clean, but, as always, something iffy might occasionally slip through, but it’s mainly things like people’s snapshots, artistic stuff, bands, some random things, and a TON of little kids). Here’s the link:
http://play.blogger.com/

Curveball Thrown

2007-09-22T22:10:00.000-04:00

As of this evening, I no longer have a sim partner. They decided to wash her out of the program and we aren't really sure what's going to happen with me. I'm still in the program, but they're in the process of deciding if I'm going to join the other crew here in Greeley (who are a day ahead of me) or head down to Denver to join the First Officer crew starting there tomorrow (or a 3-person Captain crew there). It sounds like they're planning on keeping me here (which is good, because I don't have to suddenly repack all of my stuff and abandon $50 worth of food I bought), but it's still going to be really hard to stay on track. Our instructors have been talking for weeks about how important it is to get a rhythm going with your partner (which we were just beginning to get) and now I both don't have a partner and I'll be interrupting the rhythm of another crew.

Basically, it's going to be a lot harder for me from here on out. So yeah, I need a lot of prayer. I need to be able to catch up to the other guys and develop a rhythm with each of them very quickly and still be learning all this new stuff in the sim (at the moment, I'm halfway through). Please pray also for Melanie, she seems to be taking it well, but I don't know if it's really sunk in yet for her. So yeah, a curveball's been thrown at my sim training and I'm really going to have to amp up my game to stay in it.

Quoth the Sim Nazi: "No day off for you!"

2007-09-22T18:07:00.001-04:00

Today my airwork was kinda hit-and-miss. There were some things I did really well at and others not so well. Unfortunately, they've decided Melanie (my sim partner) needs more work, so the company is going to pay nearly a thousand dollars to get her an extra period of a couple of hours in the sim tomorrow (our "day off"). Even though I won't get any PF (Pilot Flying) time' this means that I'm going to have to come in too. :(

I'm still hoping to have the time to listen to the really-fantastic Driscoll sermon I have on my phone (I've been wanting to listen to it again and it would be too hard to find my way to a church tomorrow, so I was going to listen to it instead) and talk to Kathy, but I'm still bummed about not having the whole day off.Ok, our break's about over (I just go done flying, now it's Melanie's turn for the next couple of hours), so I g2g. Later everyone!

Disclaimer: By the title of this post, I in no way desire to imply anything negative about my sim instructor (in fact, Steve is a skilled instructor and I have a lot of respect for him); it is merely humorous reference to a well-known Seinfeld episode.

A Little Better

2007-09-22T02:34:00.001-04:00

Day two of the sim went a little better. My fine-tuning of the controls and situational awareness were much improved, but I still have a long way to go. My steep turns were easily within ATP standards, so I had something to feel pleased about. I'm finally picking up on how to do stalls, so hopefully I'll get those within standards soon. We started having emergencies today and did ok, but our workload goes way up when things go wrong, so we have our work cut out for us.

For dinner tonight, I was able to make some fried spagetti, which was really good. You might be thinking that life must be pretty dull if I'm mentioning that on my blog, but you have to understand that it's one of my favorite dishes and just how cool it is to finally be able to have some after living in the Rimrock Inn for a month.

Right now, I'm sitting in the double-wide recliner in the house watching a History Channel special on Mega Disasters (this one is about how it won't be too long before Krakatoa goes off again, and it'll be even bigger this time around). You might be wondering why I'm slacking off and watching this instead of studying for the sim. The answer is really pretty simple: the sim sucks the life out of you so much that studying afterwards would be all but ineffective, so I only do a little studying after we get done with the sim in the evening and do most of my studying in the morning before we head to briefing at 12:30.

Ok, before I post this and hit the sack, I've got a couple of links for you (both sorta music related this time around):

My mom sent this one to me today. Not exactly sure of the back story behind it, but my understanding is that it's some church youth group performing at some sort of conference to Casting Crown's "Who Am I." It's really pretty cool and I was really impressed by it. I don't know if the link will work when I submit this post via email from my phone, but if it doesn't just copy it into your address bar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7x3VnrqbA&eurl=

This other link is a video of a prototype/concept little robot that dances when it hears music through the microphone in its nose, looks at people through the little cameras mounted in its eyes, and just generally appears so life-like that it's hard to believe it's a robot (and doesn't have every move programed into it in sequence, but is actually reacting to the world around it):
http://beatbots.org/

Not Good

2007-09-20T22:27:00.001-04:00

So, the first day of the sim didn't go so well for my sim partner and I. We've both got our work cut out for us if we want to survive this thing. Tomorrow we start having emergencies, so our workload is going to go way up.

As for tonight, we're on our way back to the house from picking up somethings we forgot last night at Walmart. I'm gonna make some dinner and then probably hit the sack relatively early (I'm exhausted from today and I still have a lot of catching up to do on sleep from Tuesday night.

Please be praying for us out here, we definitely need it.

Back To Training...

2007-09-19T22:18:00.000-04:00

"I'm leaving on a jet plane,
don't know when I'll be back again..."

I don't know if any of you are fans of that TV show Airline (the reality show about Southwest, I think it's on TBS), but those opening words to its theme song were running through my head as I took my seat on their 6:50 to Denver this morning and started typing this post on my phone.

The flight was mostly empty (40 pax on a plane with room for 130!) and the flight crew was really friendly to me. I've never traveled on SWA before, so it was interesting to compare my observations against the popular image of them being a much friendlier airline than most. I think they've earned that rep for a reason; the cabin crew was really friendly (as an aside, I have to give props to United here, because their cabin crew was also so top-notch on my trip home on Friday night), when I ran into the FO at the entrance to the plane and asked him if I could go forward to speak to the captain (whose permission I have to obtain to ride on his ship), he not only eagerly said "yeah, go right ahead!," he also told me that the Captain's name was Mike! To top it all off, I have to say that I've never seen any other airline put a rocking chair at each of their gates. So yeah, I was pretty impressed with Southwest.

Right now, I'm sitting in a food court area of the Denver airport waiting for my sim partner to arrive on her flight from Milwaukee. When she gets here, we're going to go meet up with someone from the Sim facility who'll drive us up to Greely. Because I got in so late last night from Lafayette and had to get up so early for my flight, I decided not to cut into my 2 hours of sleep any further by eating before I left, so I just finished an EggMcMuffin meal. I have to say, it was pretty good, but I've realized that when I make them at home they turn out a lot better (though I've yet to make as tasty a hashbrown).

You know, like I was telling Rebecca last night when she called as I was driving back to Chicago, going home is really a two-edged sword (in this context, I'm referring to Purdue as home). On the one hand, it's awesome to be able to go back, surprise everyone (especially when you show up somewhere you really aren't expected, like on Earhart E6 or in someone's pantry), and spend a couple of days with them, but on the other hand, it makes being away a lot harder. After a while of being away, you kind of get used to not seeing everyone (that's not to say you stop missing them, in fact, you actually miss them more and more over time, but you adjust to not seeing them), but then when you actually see them it makes saying goodbye and mustering up the resolve to actually get in the carand drive about impossible.

After many hours of not typing anything, I'm now in Greeley on the way back to the Thai houses after picking up supplies at WalMart. The houses are pretty nice, but they don't have wifi, so if I want to use the net I have to use the old public computer in the living room or tether the lappy to my phone (works, but it's slow), so even if I somehow have time away from my studying to be online, I'll likely not be on AIM. I got a short nap in this afternoon, so I'm mostly functional, but I've gotten virtually no studying done and it's going to be hard to stay awake while working on that tonight.

Ok, that's enough for today. I'll try to attach a picture of the house to this post so you can see what it looks like (I'd post more pictures, especially from my time at Purdue, but I'm typing this out on my phone and don't foresee the time to do that in the near-term future. Goodnight from Greeley, I miss you guys!

The Weather Couldn't Stop Me

2007-08-19T02:41:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm finally in Billings, Montana. Currently, I'm sitting in my room at the Rimrock Inn, having just pulled my clothing out of the space-saving vacuum bags. The Rimrock is definitely nothing to write home about, so I won't. (well, maybe I'll put up a couple of pictures from the hotel/the view/training later on, we'll see).

It's been a crazy week. I've been going nuts trying to pack all my stuff and get ready to start, so I'm really tired. I was up especially late Friday night moving boxes of my stuff downstairs, finishing a couple of last-minute tasks, and trying to figure out how I was going to fit 2 weeks of clothing into my suitcase (along with all the rather-thick books they're requiring me to bring) and still leave room for the manuals I'm going to get over the course of the training (oh do I wish I could vacuum pack those!). Finally on Saturday I got up, finished packing, and we left for the airport. After an uneventful ride on Frontier to Denver (probably the last airline ticket I'll be paying for in a long time), I had to go pick up my bags at the baggage claim, take them over to the Big Sky ticket counter and get my boarding pass (which is really more of a half-counter at the very end of the ticket counters, the Big Sky guys weren't even at the desk when I showed up, someone else had to go get them!), recheck them, go through security again (fortunately, it was a quiet day in Denver), get some dinner, and finally made it to my gate with about an hour to spare.

After waiting about 45 minutes, I found out from the guy at the gate counter (just in case you haven't figured it out yet, this is a small outfit, he was one of the same guys who'd been working at the ticket counter earlier) that the flight had run into some weather and was going to be delayed about 2 hours. Fortunately, after overhearing the two of us talking and figuring out that I was a new-hire FO, someone else who was waiting for the flight came over and introduced herself as Melanie, another one of the new hires. So we got to chat as we waited for our flight and compared notes about our prior training and what we know about Big Sky.

Anyway, the plane finally showed up (and it's even uglier than I expected!) and we climbed into a very-small cabin for the ride up to Billings (with a brief stop at Sheridan, WY along the way).

Ok, I think that's about it for now, all this to say that I'm safely here, tired (scratch that, more like exhausted), and hoping my roommate for the next 3 weeks doesn't show up until sometime tomorrow afternoon so I can sleep in a little (and that he's a relatively nice guy).

'night.

Bored in the Minivan

2007-07-27T19:27:00.000-04:00

For those of you who didn't already know this, my family has five birthdays within the span of a month and a half during the summer (Specifically, mine, my brother's, my grandfather's, and our two adopted cousins, Sarah and Sam). So, as a result, we traditionally travel up to Minnesota for a weekend at the end of July so that we can all celebrate together at once. Well, we're on our way up there now (if the pictures I'm attaching work, you should be able to see that Kathy is with us) and we just stopped at the Culver's in Tomah for a snack.

For those interested in such things, this will likely be my last or second-to-last post from this cell phone. That's right folks, I'm getting a new phone! I'm switching to Sprint (after being with Cingular for years) and will soon be the owner of an HTC Mogul (Google it if you want to learn what it looks like, I'm not going to bother typing links on my phone). Here's the way I see it:

The Upside: I get a better plan for a lot less money per month (more minutes, faster data, and I can tether it to my laptop as a wireless broadband internet connection).

The Downside: I have to give up a phone I love (Cingular 3125, aka HTC Star Trek) for the bulkier Mogul (although it is a lot more powerful, being a full PocketPC).

The Mogul should arrive on Monday or Tuesday and I'm expecting to have it up and running by Wednesday (don't worry, my number isn't changing).

Ok, that's enough for now, have a good weekend!

A View From The Bus

2007-07-18T18:39:00.000-04:00

So, I've got some bad news:

My trip to Lafayette and Indianapolis is over.

I'm currently sitting on a Metra train pulling out of Ogillve (sp?) Station in downtown Chicago on my way to Geneva, where I'll pick up my car and drive the last couple of miles home. The picture is of the view out the window as my bus arrived in Chicago a half-hour ago.

My trip was fantastic. I really enjoyed seeing my friends in Lafayette and getting some quality time with them (something I've definitely been missing as I sit at my basement desk all day, every day), as well as seeing some of the people at my church who've really become family over the last four years.

After a couple of days in Lafayette, I got on a train down to Indy to spend a few days with Kathy. We spent Monday visiting Purv (my former roommate) and riding his horses, then spent Tuesday relaxing at her house, and finished our visit today with a trip to the Indianapolis Zoo (where she's working this summer).

Ok, that's enough of an update for now, I'm tired of typing on my cell phone (and only lasted this long thanks to Windows Mobile and t9 Text Entry). I think I'll just spend the rest of the ride missing everybody...

On the train

2007-07-13T17:46:00.000-04:00

I wrote the post below on the train on my way to Indiana, but due to some bugs in the system it didn't show up until after I got back. Anyway, enjoy!

Ah, the joys of Windows Mobile! That's right folks, I'm sitting on the Chicago Metra punching this out on my cell phone (It's times like this that I love t9 text entry) as I ride into downtown to catch my AmTrak to Lafayette (and to think, I don't even have an iPhone!). As nice as this is, it will be a lot easier if I end up buying that OQO ultra-portable computer in a few months.
Here's a view out the window (yeah, I know it's not much to look at, but still):

(looks like the picture might not work, I guess we'll see.)

I've already figured out that I forgot some study materials for Big Sky that I was going to work on while on the train. :( Oh well, I guess.

Well, time to post this, see you later!

New (used) Car

2007-07-13T11:04:00.000-04:00

Hey folks, just a quick little update before I leave town for a few days (going to Lafayette to visit people there Saturday and Sunday and then onto Indy to see Kathy Monday-Wednesday). I bought a car! It's a 2000 Honda Accord EX with 93,000 miles and practically in new condition. The downside is that it's a stick shift (which I find annoying), but I was able to get a really good deal for the car because it had been on the lot for 45 days and nobody wanted a stick! I actually paid less for it than Kelly Blue Book said such a car would be worth in "Good" condition from a private party seller (and it was definitely in excellent condition from a car dealership). Here are some pictures (to appease the people who absolutely demanded that I post pics):

Head-on:

Car Ad-style shot:
Cru sticker and, just to make me feel old, Purdue alumni license plate holder (a graduation gift from my wonderful girlfriend):

Interior (with that blasted manual transmission!):

Oh-yeah!!!

I figure I have enough room for at least two bodies in here:

And finally, one last extra touch I got at the Mall of America...

Anyway, I've got a lot to get done before I get on my train out of town later today, so I've got to end my post without the usual deluge of random links and news from my boring life at home (hmm, well, no need for an update then, the word "boring" really about sums it up). Still no news about when training for Big Sky will start, I don't think they've set the August class date yet.

Ok, fine! If you're going to demand my random links so much, here's a couple of car-related ones:

Watch the video on this one, it's insane!
1993 Lincoln Mark VIII Rolling Door Concept Car

W00t for Photoshop!
(at least, I hope these are Photoshopped, otherwise I WANT ONE!!!)

And, just because it's so supremely cool, here's one that's not car related (watch the video all the way through, the really awesome part comes near the end):
Music generated by the sparking of a Tesla Coil

And for you aviation buffs:
Insane 747 landing at St. Maarten

Ok, that's it for today, later everyone!

SNOW DAY!!!

2007-02-13T12:20:00.000-05:00

Due to the incredible blizzard hitting Lafayette right now (we're expecting 8-12 inches by the time it's done), Purdue has canceled classes from noon today until noon tomorrow!

This is the very first snow day that I've had my entire life!!!!!

w00t!!!

Prophecy

2007-01-31T21:01:00.000-05:00

II Kings 2:23-25 (NIV)
“23From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" 24He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths. 25And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.”

Now, all you need to understand this passage is this simple guide to the characters:

Elisha = Lovie Smith
Bears = Da Bears
Punk teenagers = Manning and company

Now you know what the Bible has to say about this Sunday’s big game.

GO BEARS!!!

The Real Reason Shawn Hasn't Been Blogging This Semester...

2007-01-24T18:33:00.000-05:00

poke “Is it dead?” –Tiller

2006-11-12T23:46:00.000-05:00

“Dammit Jim! I’m a pilot, not a physician!”

And, with that small ode to Dr. Leonard McCoy, I’ll proceed to answer Tiller’s question. In case you haven’t figured out by the few posts I have made this fall, this semester is by far the busiest I’ve had yet in my college career. Because of that, blogging has been one of those things that hasn’t been getting done because it’s not high enough on the priority list (I figure my state of being perpetually behind in my classes should take at least some precedence). Also, I have traditionally done most of my blogging while at work at the AvTech library, but my schedule this semester has been less conducive to writing while I’m at work (more homework to do at work, less long shifts that present more free time to write, not working closings when the library is dead quiet, etc). Naturally, some of you have noticed I haven’t been writing much and have taken guesses as to why, so perhaps now that you know the truth of the matter it would be entertaining to look at my Top 5 favorite incorrect guesses “why Shawn hasn’t been blogging:”

5. He started playing Counter Strike: Source (a first-person shooter computer game) on Eddie’s computer and quickly discovered that he’s so good that he decided to tour the country and make a living off his winnings from CS:S tournaments

4. He’s spent the last month moonlighting as a superhero. (Let me tell you, saving the world every night really saps the creative juices!)

3. He hasn’t stopped blogging. In fact, he’s continued to write at the usual average of 2 posts per week, but he’s been asked by his publisher to refrain from posting them so as not to infringe on the sales of his upcoming autobiography: “Stick, Rudder, and Keyboard: A Pilot’s College Life Through the Eyes of Blogger.com,” a compilation of the 2.5 years of posts from the spring of sophomore year through graduation this May. Coming summer ’07, preorder your copy now (only $29.95)!

2. He is deceased, having been murdered by Purdue’s infamous “killer squirrels” after they learned of his brilliant plot to capture them, put them all in hamster wheels, and use the ensuing energy to take over the world.

1. He has a girlfriend. (Sorry, but while the rumor they all want me is most definitely true; I do not have a girlfriend at the time of this writing. NOTE: I reserve the right to change this fact at any time without prior warning, public debate, or right of appeal by outside parties. )

Ok, so I might have made a couple of those up…

Fine…if you want to be technical about it…I made all of them up (except for #1, that one is actually a bit of wishful thinking on part of my grandparents that they mentioned to my mom recently), but let’s not bother ourselves with such minutia.

The truth of the matter is that I’ve just been insanely busy the last few weeks. Last week (the 2^nd-6^th) makes a perfect example:

-Thursday evening I flew as co-pilot on a King Air trip to Lansing, Michigan and came back three hours later.

-Friday afternoon I had an exam in my Accounting class (didn’t go well).

-Friday evening – Sunday afternoon I went to the Campus Crusade Fall Retreat (really sweet, but I only got 5 hours of sleep Friday night because I was up late talking with some guys and 2.5 hours of sleep Saturday night because I was working on Encouragement Boards until 5:30am (if you don’t know what E-Boards are, feel free to ask sometime)).

-Sunday evening I went to Indianapolis to see Audio Adrenaline on their last tour (really sad because they were on their last tour and they were opening for another band, MercyMe; they only got to play 8 songs and weren’t even able to play some of their harder stuff like Mighty Good Leader, Chevette, We’re A Band, etc because of the MercyMe audience).

-Sunday night I got 3.5 hours of sleep because I had to finish a bunch of homework and get up for the 727 Sim on Monday morning.

-Monday I had a cross-country in the 727 Sim, an interview in my Interviewing class, and two quizzes in my 727 Ground class

Yeah, pretty crazy. The good news is that the last couple of days have been relatively quiet, so I’ve been able to catch up on some sleep (10.5 hours Friday night!) and try to relax a little. Probably the single biggest (and best) news from this week is that Shane has returned from his month of job training down in Atlanta! I got a call from him on Wednesday announcing that he would get back Thursday (he wasn’t supposed to get back until this weekend) and that I was sworn to secrecy as the only person who knew about his early return (he even kept it from his roommates). We decided to surprise everyone by arranging for everybody to meet for dinner Thursday night with the promise of me announcing some good news that I’d just gotten (Shane’s back!) to them all at once. Chip was not terribly happy that I was keeping my good news from him and did a lot of guessing about a number of topics (as did Amy Chen), but I was able to neither confirm nor deny anything (I think Shane returning was one of his top guesses by the end). A couple hours before we were to all meet Chip teamed up with the ARK girls to try to make a joke out of their guessing by each of them sending me a Hallmark E-Card with congratulations of one sort or another (apparently Thursday was a big day for me, not only did Shane come back, but I’m also told I had an anniversary (oops, I forgot!), bought a new house, celebrated my bar mitzvah, and had a kid!). Needless to say, we are all very happy to have Shane back because we missed him a lot.

Ok, I think that’s it for now. I don’t know when I’ll get to posting next (might even be later this week, predictions are for it to be relatively quiet), but I’m thinking I might devote an entire post to pictures from various things thus far this semester (Turkey Run, Fall Retreat, random craziness, etc). I’d do it now, but I’d rather get this posted and spend the time uploading pictures later.

as longsuffering as algebra

2006-10-03T11:33:00.000-04:00

A friend/apprentice of mine posted this poem by her suitemate on her blog and I thought it was funny enough to be worthy of a repost (with permission, of course). Enjoy!

as longsuffering as algebra

it waits

for someone
to understand it

for someone
to ace its tests

for someone
to get its formulae

it is a little like love
only not really

it is patient
sometimes kind

it is never envied
those who get it

boast and are proud
it is rude

to make an artist
take it

it is self-seeking
it causes those

who are easily angered
to get angry

even thse who are not
do

if you get it wrong
it is obvious

it is evil
but also true

those who like it
protect it

its anwers claim
to be trustworthy

those who don't get it
hope for the best

and those who are smart
perservere

until they
get it

Is Blogger Broken?

2006-09-28T12:03:00.000-04:00

Apparently so. You see, when I've looked at my last post (from several different computers), Blogger is quite sure that only 4 people commented on ideas for fluff classes (specifically Grandpa, Rebecca, "Guess Who," and Kathy), yet others have also insisted that they made comments as well. Seeing as how I've got no reason to doubt them, I'm guessing there must be something wrong with Blogger.

So, here's how you can help test if this is a one-time problem or something ongoing; please leave a comment to this post. You don't really have to have much to say (although funny/random/weird anecdotes/jokes/etc and public declarations of your undying loyalty to my ongoing campaign for world domination are always appreciated), except that I also want you to say how many comments are on the post at the time that you are posting it (including your own). If you aren't one of the four above whose Fluff posts are actually showing up and you have something to say on the matter, I still haven't decided on my fluff class yet, so please throw that in.

In other news, I have three exams between today and tomorrow (one today in Airline Indoc, one tomorrow in Financial Accounting, and one take-home for Aviation Security due 5pm tomorrow via email), so I can't really stop to make a full post. I'm also trying to Ghost the Lappy (it and Norton Ghost don't get along very well), so I have a backup in case I don't like Vista when I install it (which will be as soon as I get it backed up to my satisfaction).

As a warning, if you give me a call, don't expect me to know who you are from Caller ID. I got a new phone a couple of days ago, but I'm going to have to manually re-enter all 246 contacts because I can't transfer them over the SIM card. So, until I get those re-entered, my Caller ID only shows numbers and my only knowledge of who's calling is if I recognize the area code. Albert was nice enough to sell me a halfway-decent Bluetooth headset he's not using, so don't be surprised if I become like the Fack with a small plastic bug perpetually perched on my ear.

Update 9/27/06 11:27am: As soon as I uploaded this post, Blogger suddenly decided there were two more comments on the Fluff post. I don't know why it's acting this way, but there is definitely something wrong going on. That said, please go ahead and leave comments as I requested above so we can figure out if it's still acting up like that.

Fluff Me Up

2006-09-21T13:07:00.000-04:00

Hard to believe, but yesterday morning I registered for classes for the last time. I guess my time at Elgin Community College paid off; I will complete my Purdue career without ever taking a Math or English course here and I have only 11 credits left to take. Actually, I don't really need those 11 credits as credits, they're just required classes for my major (to graduate in my program you need a minimum of 128 credits and I've already got 132 at the start of this semester).

Naturally, of course, this 11 credit business raises a slight problem; you have to have 12 credit hours in a semester to be counted as a "full time" student (and I have to be full time to keep my scholarships). Thus, I need to find a "fluff" class to fill that extra credit. The question is, which one?

I'd take the Wine Tasting class that's so highly rated, but it meets for 3 hours on Monday nights, which is time I've already dedicated to Kent's Action Group. I took Music Appreciation a year ago and really liked it, but I've heard that most of the other similar '_____ Appreciation' classes (Art, Jazz, Theater, etc) tend to be a fair amount of work (yes, I'm lazy. I don't mind having a little homework, but I don't want to have enough stuff to do that it ruins my ability to take the class purely for fun). I haven't ruled out Tree Climbing yet, but I don't know if they offer it in the Spring (and yes, it actually is a class; forestry majors need some sort of certification in it to work certain jobs). Bowling was a lot of fun and, considering I already have my own ball, is my backup plan in case I can't think of anything else to take.

So, here's how you can help. Please leave a comment and tell me two things:

A) Any ideas you might have for a good fluff class. Even if you haven't taken it yourself and have just heard good things, I want all the ideas I can get. It doesn't have to be something silly like Bowling either, it can be a legitimate "let's learn something here" class. I just want something that's any combination of fun, interesting, useful, different, or predominantly female (shut up, we flight guys have it even worse than you engineers; out of 70 seniors in flight there
are a total of 5 girls! And yes, before any of you wiseguys suggest "Concepts in Modern Feminism," I am totally kidding on this one).

B) Tell me your favorite class you've ever taken in college (...and why. Your short-essay, double spaced, standard margins, APA-cited answers will be graded and turned back to you by Monday...jk). Yeah, even if it's just something required for your major and a ton of work, I still want to hear about it. I might know nothing on the subject and just barely able to survive a pass/fail setup, but I'm just eccentric enough that I might try if it catches my interest (at this point, Chip's probably pondering suggesting some 600-level Orbital Mechanics class where the math is so weird it'd make Einstein's head spin).

By the way, I still want those ideas from you even if you didn't go to Purdue. Frequently different universities will offer classes that are essentially the same, so I could probably find something similar in Purdue's course catalog.

In other news, I have a field trip today for my Aviation Security "class" (is it really a class if you spend your time watching Mythbusters and playing Terrorism History/Organizations Jeopardy for candy prizes?). There's an airline having an emergency drill simulating a mock crash, terrorist incident, something (not real clear on the details) and somehow our Professor hass arranged for us to be able to watch. Apparently it's a privilege for us to be able to do this because it is a drill for them to practice on and thus not a public event, so being able to get in is pretty special.

I've just ordered a new cell phone which is supposed to get here on Monday. It's the Cingular 3125 (a rebranded HTC Star Trek), a flip phone the same size as Motorola's RAZR (except a milimeter thicker) that runs Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition. That's a fancy way of saying that it's basically a Pocket PC without a touchscreen. It'll be really useful for me because I already use the primitive calendar functions in my phone (which is rapidly dying) to keep track of my life, so now I'll be able to use Outlook's Calendar and just sync it up with my phone. I also might be able to use the EDGE network (high speed data for cell phones) and Bluetooth to use the phone as a wireless modem for my laptop if I ever really need to do something and don't have any internet access. A good friend of mine also has a pretty decent Bluetooth headset that he's willing to sell me for cheap, so I will finally be able to part with the annoying headset wires. I've been stalling on getting a new phone for as long as I can because there just aren't any phones that I like on the market and this one just came out. I'd continue to stall longer if I could, but my phone has gotten so bad that when I answer it, nearly half of my calls have the problem that either I can't hear them or they can't hear me, so it's just getting frustrating. I'm also getting a new plan with more minutes (and I figured out how to get a small discount through Purdue), so I won't have to worry about my minutes as much anymore.

Anyways, it's time for me to go get some lunch before the field trip. Have a good one and don't forget to answer the fluff class questions!

Arrrggh! (or: Talk Like A Pirate Day)

2006-09-19T11:37:00.000-04:00

Sorry, no time for a real post today (life has continued to be crazy around here). The latest: car is working, Lappy needs to go back to Toshiba because they botched the repair, the King Air trip to Boston last week was so-so, and I just got an email that a couple of my classes today and tomorrow are cancelled because Prof. Bernie Wulle is in the hospital (that's all I know, so please pray for him). That's all for now (check back later today or call me for one of my new favorite pirate jokes, I'm not going to post it now because I don't want to spoil my ability to tell it today).

ARRRR!!!!

A Conversation From This Evening

2006-09-04T23:57:00.000-04:00

Me: "Hey, let's go to Walmart, I need to pick up a few things."
My car: "It's not in my nature to be mysterious, but I won't start, and you don't know why..."

150

2006-09-04T21:57:00.000-04:00

Wow, post number 150. I've had 19,104 hits since I started tracking in April 2005, and over 76,200 page views (mostly for the M4 review, of course). Wow. 'nuff said.

Good news! I've just received word that the Lappy is finally repaired and about to be shipped back to me!!! If they ship it tomorrow, I'll probably get it Wednesday or Thursday. If they didn't re-image the hard drive, I should be up and running at full strength by the time classes start on Monday (it'll take me a couple of days to finish the stuff I was working on when I sent it off for repairs and get my essential data loaded onto it). w00t!

Scott's wedding was absolutely amazing yesterday (Scott Carrington, my former roommate, not my brother Scott)! Outside on the side of a hill in beautiful weather while the sun began to set over one of the few lakes in Indiana in the background. Instead of focusing on traditions and the marriage itself, they made prayer and dedicating the union to God a huge part of the ceremony (at one point, they had the couple that mentored them come up and huddle with Scott, Rita, and the pastor while they prayed for about 10 minutes on stage with the microphones off, so we just sat in silence). And to top it all off, it wasn't even 40 minutes start to finish!

It was like a Quad reunion at the reception; Andy and Bob were there (former roommates of Scott and my cell group leaders freshman year) along with their wives. So were Mike and Hope, Pat (one of the guys who lived in SW225 the year before I came), Sean, Shane, Chip, Adam, Eddie, Cobb, etc. Yeah, we had a lot of fun.

I spent the night at Buddy's Playhouse (home of Buddy and Leeann Pollock, Chip's parents) with Chip, Bliggy, Shane, Amy, and Rachel. We pretty much all collapsed when we got there, but not before Luna (Chip's black lab) decided that Bliggy was the first person she didn't like, ever (she changed her mind once he changed out of his nice clothes). This morning we got up, and after some Krispy Kreme's and playing with Luna for a while, we decided to brave the not-so-cold air (at least, I thought it was nice, others were cold) and head out on the jet ski. They'd already taken two of them out of the water, so we had to take turns on the only one left. I took Rachel out for a ride while she kept a death grip on me (we only *almost* tipped once!), then later on I sat in back and held on for my own life as I taught her how to drive it. I rode with Chip on the way back in the TransAm convertible he talked his dad into lending him for a week (I'm beginning to sense a trend, every time Chip and I drive home together from a weekend event (all 2 of them), we spend almost the entire time having a deep discussion about the same subject. Different variations, but always the same subject...lol)

I know what I want for Christmas! Yeah, ok, so it may be a bit early to be thinking about Christmas, but how supremely cool is this? That's right, an official, Boeing-licensed, Lego model of the 787 Dreamliner (with a 27" wingspan!). If I hadn't just spent so much money on the Compy (and soon will be spending more, because I'm going to return the mobo for a different make/model that's more expensive, and hopefully, more reliable), I'd go out and buy it right now. Sadly, I'm simply too broke to display this thing on the top of my desk just yet (*hint* unless of course, some reader is feeling really generous today! *hint* jk)

Ok, that's it for now. Post #150 signing out...

Just Staying Afloat (or: Where Are The Lifejackets?)

2006-08-31T16:29:00.000-04:00

It's barely been two weeks since classes started and already I'm feeling overwhelmed. Perhaps some summary is in order...

No single one of my classes are particularly bad (although one comes close), but this is definitely my hardest semester to date. Most of my classes are moderately difficult, moreso than in the past because there's a lot more information to memorize verbatim and a lot more work to do outside of the class than the "here's what you need to regurgitate on the next test" that we've grown accustomed to over the last three years. I have two bad points in my schedule, but otherwise it's ok for the most part. The first is that I have the 727 Sim (moved up to the much-nicer -200 this year, so that's a plus) at 7:30 on Monday mornings, which history tells us is not a time where one is likely to find me with the alertness needed when something goes wrong. The second is that on Wednesday mornings, I have to get from the airport to the Electrical Engineering building in 10 minutes (a little over 2 miles by my estimates), so I've had to explain to my Accounting professor that I'm going to be a few minutes late that day because there's simply no way to make it on time.

That said, I do have one class that seems like it might be somewhat fun. The first clue of that was when the professor announced a specific half of the class had been flagged for extra security at the airport and asked us to figure out why (myself included). Turned out that she'd Googled all of us and decided who to flag based on the results (in my case, it was because she found my blog and from reading it discovered that I liked computers and when to the Middle East). Because the field of Aviation Security (the name of the class) is changing so rapidly, our 2004 textbook is pretty much outdated and we spend a lot of time in class discussing the issues involved, related current events (like the 10-year-old who announced he had a bomb on a United flight a couple days ago, I'd give you a link, but I can't find a good one), or watching the
Mythbusters clip on what would happen if someone fired a gun inside a pressurized airliner. So yeah, it seems like this is going to be my easiest class of the semester.

In other news, the Lappy's still in Kentucky waiting for parts (they replaced the motherboard and then discovered there was something wrong with the new one, so now they're waiting for yet another one to come). We discovered it wasn't the processor that was defective on the Compy after all, Newegg actually sent me two defective motherboards in a row. I just got the third one a couple of days ago and it seems to be working ok so far. By tomorrow morning I should be able to say with confidence that it isn't defective in the same way as the other two (although it does have one little oddity of its own, but not something of any significance). Because of how long the overclocking process will take once I determine I have a good motherboard (and installing/configuring my software), I think it's going to still be a couple of weeks before the Compy is fully operational. Thankfully, Adam and Eddie have been very generous in letting me use their computers when they're not on them, so I'm not completely cut off.

Drama seems to be in ample supply around here, and we all know how I feel about drama (I loathe it). My memory could be bad, but it does seem like there's more of it this early on in the semester than there has been in previous years. Ugh...'nuff said.

On a better note, two old friends of mine are now Freshmen here! When I lived in Minnesota and went to Grace Church Roseville, my family was in the same cell group as Ben's family and we'd sometimes go biking together, so it's really cool to see him. The other one, Ruthie, is the younger sister of my friend Abe from my church in Wheaton and I frequently call her by the nickname "Pineapple" she earned in Junior High (she was obsessed with them for a while). So yeah, that's been fun to have them around, especially because Abe is the only other person here that I knew before Purdue.

On Saturday we kidnapped Amy Chen and took her to Steak 'N Shake for her birthday. Overall it wasn't an overly traumatic experience for her and we didn't even need to use the saran wrap we brought in case she put up a fight (although it would be kind of silly for her to resist when I storm into the room with 10 people behind me and announce "you're coming with us."). Apparently Dustin, Edgar, and Greg pulled a copycat kidnapping later that evening, but they didn't think to turn on the child locks (naturally, I did) and their quarry almost escaped because of it (I am the Master for a reason :) ).

I've recently started Kay Arthur's LORD, Teach Me to Pray in 28 Days (Precept Ministries, w00t!) as part of my quiet time and it has been my daily dose of sanity in all this business. It is basically a month-long study of the Lord's Prayer and it's really sweet. The last few days have been spent looking at how the Lord's Prayer (and others in scripture, featuring examples from Isaiah, Daniel, etc) start with worship and today's partially focused on just how much of a privilege it is for a believer to address God as "Father" when praying (which I knew before, but it helped me understand on a much deeper level). I'm probably going to suggest that the Cary Action Group do this book as our study for the semester (Adam and I have a very strong desire to make prayer a huge focus of the Quad this year, so it seems appropriate).

Anyways, it's time for class...

Not good, not good at all...

2006-08-15T01:31:00.000-04:00

Last I posted, I was in the midst of installing the new parts for my computer. When I turned it on for the first time, it seemed ok, but the next day it wouldn't start. I finally got it to start and it worked for a while, then stopped again. I figured that my motherboard was defective, so I started the RMA process and sent it away just before leaving for Minnesota. Well, I finally got my replacement motherboard today and BAM, nothing happened. Yep, it wasn't the motherboard that was defective, it was the processor. Now I need to send the processor in for an RMA replacement, and the soonest I'll get it back is probably the end of next week(but I have something I really needed the compy to do this Friday night, so I'm in big trouble).

Yeah, and the Lappy's still in the shop (somewhere in Kentucky), so I'll be lucky if I can get it back before classes start (when I really need it for classes). Even when I get it back it'll probably be a while before it's ready to go online. Basically this all means I will probabaly not have a working computer to my name for the next two weeks (I should be able to borrow my roommate's computers for email, but if you need to get a hold of me the only reliable way is going to be my cell). grrr...

To top it all off I'm frantically packing to move back to Purdue on Wednesday and, although I'm making progress, I'm not making enough of it to feel like I'm getting anywhere. I still have a mile-long to-do list (seems like the more I get done the more gets added to the list) and some things on it would get done a lot faster if only I had my compy working.

grrrr.....

Virtually Missing

2006-08-03T02:04:00.000-04:00

As some of you may have noticed, my usually ubiquitous online presence has been strangely absent lately. I haven’t been on Trillian (AIM), updating my blog, updating my Facebook, etc. Yeah, things have been insanely busy around here lately (even more so than I usually am at school) and my to-do list is depressingly long and getting longer. To top it off, both of my computers are INOP (inoperative) at the moment, but more on that later.

I still miss the MidEast like crazy, especially in this “limbo” state of suspended animation within my basement between Project and Purdue. I ended up taking over 1300 pictures while I was there and I haven’t even had the time to look through them more than twice or burn a DVD of them to send to my teammates. Hopefully I’ll get through enough of my “urgent” to-do stuff to be able to do that before I move back to school two weeks from yesterday. Yeah, Project was nothing short of amazing and I really wish we could have stayed longer.

My birthday went well on Saturday; I pretty much just took it easy most of the day (meaning I felt relaxed while trying to fix the lappy) and then had a few close friends over for pizza and videogames. In a decidedly unexpected twist, a full two-thirds of the “happy birthday” calls I got on that day came from the Upper West rather than the Midwest, where the majority of the people I know live (“upper west” might not be a real term, so just think of it as everything north and/or west of Wyoming). Now some of you are probably muttering under your breath about just how bizarre or idiotic a person has to be to actually post a fact like that online, but I figured it was just weird enough to be interesting (hey, it’s 12:15am, a lot of weird stuff is interesting at this time of night).

Quick preview of the next two weeks before I leave for school:
-We’re headed up to Minnesota from Friday to Monday to visit family and celebrate birthdays (we now have 5 of them within about a month of each other). I’m psyched because I haven’t seen my baby cousins since Christmas and I’ve heard they’ve changed quite a bit (one just turned 2 and is talking and the other just turned 1 and is reportedly highly mobile).
-Uhh…I really don’t know what we’re doing the rest of next week. Probably just going crazy with work and pulling our hair out.
-Next Sunday I’m probably going to be giving a 10-15 minute presentation on my Project to my parent’s Sunday School class at our church, so I’ll pick out a few pictures and a story or two and hopefully have enough time to prepare it rather than winging something like I did for them a couple of weeks ago.
-Then I just have a few days to pack and prepare to move back to Purdue.

Finally, the issue of both computers being INOP… The Lappy (“Shawn-M4,” my TabletPC) broke at the end of last school year and I had it repaired just before I left for Project. When I got back I wiped the hard drive and have been working in reinstalling everything and getting it set up just how I want it. So far I have most of my software installed, but I still have it isolated from the internet to protect it until I figure out a few problems I’ve been having (it hasn’t gone online at all since I wiped it). As for the Compy (“Shawn64”, aka “Mr. Collins” to some of you), the motherboard died a few weeks ago, so when I finally identified the problem I decided it’d be better to go ahead and upgrade now rather than just replacing the motherboard and then having to replace it again when I upgrade in a couple of years. The last part arrived on Tuesday and I started surgery that night. As it stands right now, the majority of the new parts are in the machine and I’m going to install Windows tomorrow (the remaining parts are add-on cards and I’ll install them once I have a stable build of Windows going). Then I’ll overclock, install my software, backup, and finally go online to update Windows and begin to use the machine again. Until then, I’m using my Mom’s Tablet for work stuff, email, and the occasional visit to Facebook or the news.

By the way, I think completely replacing the vast majority of parts in the compy and reinstalling Windows means that I should probably consider it a different machine. In its former life, it was named Shawn64 on my network because it was my first machine with a 64-bit processor. The “new” one is still 64-bit, but is also a dual-core processor (and the machine should be overall quite a bit more powerful than the last), so I don’t really want to keep the same name. Due to my sleep-deprived state and having put a serious lack of thought into the matter, I haven’t come up with anything yet. You can tell from “Shawn64”, “Shawn-M4,” and “Fujitsu” (the picture frame) that previous names have been primarily functional about describing each machine; I am open to suggestions that divest from that norm.

Ok, that’s it for now. No pics, no links, just a very-tired me sitting amongst the scattered parts of my beloved Compy at 1am pondering if this floor would be comfortable enough to save me a trip upstairs to my room for the night…

Tschüs!

2006-06-27T02:23:00.000-04:00

Sorry I haven't had any time to blog (been a bit busy). At 7:30 this morning I'm leaving for my Summer Project in the Middle East and won't be back until July 17th. I highly doubt I'll be able to post anything while I'm over there, but most of you regular readers should be on my email update list anyway (or know someone who is). Thank you all for your prayers and encouragements in the months leading up to this trip and especially for your prayers while we are over there; they mean more to me than you realize. God bless!
Be Seeing You!
Shawn M. Erdenberg

Comics

2006-06-13T12:36:00.000-04:00

Saw a couple of really funny comics in today's Chicago Tribune.
First, "Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!"

And, "Speed Bump":

DONE!!!

2006-06-12T19:32:00.000-04:00

The Freiburg series is finally complete!! Despite the ongoing problems with Blogger's server regarding pictures, I was able to use the work-around and get it finished. I'll put the Table of Contents at the bottom of this post so you can jump directly to wherever you left off.

Anyways, we're off to Indiana again on RevTrak business from Wednesday through Friday (and hopefully I'll get to see a few friends in Lafayette on the way back). This last Saturday I got to pick up Chip and Rebecca at O'Hare and drop them off at their hotel for Acts 29 Summer Project (another Middle East trip) and also see Michelle and a few others leaving for Freiburg, so I'm that much more excited about leaving for my project to the Middle East on the 27th (getting close!). That's all for now, so I'll give you a picture and a link...

This strip making fun of the Burger King "King" commercials was in the Sunday Comics of the Chicago Tribune recently (I think a week ago):

Matt Oney let me know about this video last night. It's the audio from an old Monty Python skit combined with footage from the video game Halo and is absolutely hilarious:
How Not To Be Seen

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Finally some progress

2006-06-12T17:41:00.000-04:00

Ok, 2nd Saturday is finally up. Direct link:
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday

Almost...

2006-06-11T22:24:00.000-04:00

Well, I have all the text for 2nd Saturday, 2nd Sunday, and the Quote Book finished, but blogger is still having problems with picture uploads. I've found a work-around, but it is so incredibly slow that it'll be a couple of days before I can get all those pictures uploaded unless they get their server problems figured out. It's really frustrating to be this close and not be able to finally finish.

No Dice

2006-06-07T23:06:00.000-04:00

sorry folks, Blogger's server is still having problems and not accepting pictures. Hmmm...ok, to hold you over, here's a quick link to a video I came across in my travels of the net. Some "student" breaking out into a spontaneous broadway-style song in the middle of a college lecture (and it would appear that the professor and most of the class didn't have any idea it was coming):
Reach! A Lecture Musical

still here

2006-06-06T23:13:00.000-04:00

No, I haven't forgotten about you guys. I've been struggling to make progress on the Freiburg stuff because I've been sitting at my desk on the computer all day, every day and have been having a hard time getting "optional" computer work like the blog done because of it. I was able to escape to Lafayette for the weekend and had a really great time, so now I've been able to resume work. I have the 2nd Saturday post finished, but Blogger decided to bug out and not let me upload pictures today, so hopefully I'll be able to get that live sometime tomorrow or the day after. Anyways, have a good night...

2nd Friday is up!

2006-05-18T11:22:00.000-04:00

I've just finished the "Freiburg: 2nd Friday" post. Direct link:
Freiburg: 2nd Friday

Freiburg posts partially released!

2006-05-14T21:01:00.000-04:00

Because some of my more dedicated readers are close to leaving for summer project (and a certain one is also bored at work;) ), I've decided to go against my original plan and release what I have so far of the Freiburg posts done. The orginal game plan was to release them when I was done, but I don't think I'll have them done in time so that certain people don't have to rush if they want to read them before the end of the summer. As of when I'm typing this, I have all my coverage up through Thursday of the trip finished and making good progress on the rest. I'll adjust the settings on here so that if you start at the top and read down you will progress chronologically through the trip instead of the usual way a blog has the most recent stuff at the top. I'll also include links to each section at the bottom of each post in case it gets long enough with the pictures that blogger pushes stuff off the bottom of the page. So, here's what I've got so far...

Freiburg: Intro and the Team

2006-05-14T21:00:00.000-04:00

DISCLAIMER: This series of posts are not for you. Because of how busy we were, I didn't have the time to keep my own journal of the trip. So I decided to record my memories here online in a way that would serve both as my trip journal and, to a lesser extent, help you understand what our trip was like and how God worked both in our lives and the lives of the Germans we visited. So what does this disclaimer mean for you? No complaining about how long this is! If you just want to scan over the couple hundred pictures I've embedded (I'll count them up and put a total on here when it's done) and not read anything other than the captions, feel free. Oh, and one more thing, whether you read it all or scan a select few pictures: ENJOY!, Freiburg was amazing, fun, and powerful for our entire team and I hope that you'll be able to see that in these posts. So, onto my exclusive coverage of Purdue Cru Freiburg Spring Break...

I think the most appropriate way to begin my coverage of the Freiburg Spring Break trip is simply to introduce you to the team so you have some passing idea who I’m talking about. So here they are:

Chip “Fearless Leader”

Pauline

Shane

Liz “Elly” “Dee-Dee”

Travis "T-Dog" "Mr. T"

Jessica

I Tim “First Timothy”

Emily “Katie”

II Tim “Second Timothy”

Michelle

JD “Fack” “The Fack” “Fack Attack” etc

Anna

Shawn (me)

Mindy

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday

2006-05-14T20:59:00.000-04:00

1st Friday

Well, the “preconditioning” you people all thought I was crazy for actually did work. I managed to get up (and be “functional” if you use the term loosely) at 4am on the Friday we left. At about 6am I started taking my piles of stuff that I’d set out for the trip and my extensive checklist of things to remember (if I didn’t have that I’d never remember anything for a trip) and started packing. My packing strategy was a huge success because I can’t think of any significant item I forgot (or any minor ones, for that matter), used all but 3 or 4 items of clothing I brought, and fit it all into my smaller-than-average rollerboard (with the duffel bag that goes with the rollerboard folded flat inside so I could bring stuff back) and backpack without too much trouble.
After meeting some Cru people for lunch, I drove over to Tark to pick up one of the guys on the team and bring him to the airport with me. We had been given a strict 1pm show time at the Purdue airport, but lunch ran a little late so I showed up to get him at about 12:55. As soon as I reached his room I discovered that he had not yet packed at all. Seriously, he had a couple of small piles of things sitting out, but not a single thing was packed and the piles were only a fraction of what he intended to bring. Because we were on a relatively tight schedule to get to the airport so Liz’s dad could bus us to Indy for our flight, being late was bad news. In short order I had Chip on the phone appraised of the situation and this guy was frantically throwing his stuff together. We ended up leaving Tark at 1:24 and when I called to let Chip know we were on our way I generated the first entry in the Freiburg Trip Quote Book (as kept by Liz): “We are Tarkington inbound, ETA six and a half minutes.” (I think we made it in 4).

The good news is that we made it to Indy without much traffic and had no trouble making our flight to Cincinnati. I was able to go up front while we were boarding (as I later did on every flight during the trip) and meet the crew of our Embraer 145, so it was very enlightening to ask the Chautauqua Airlines crew about their experiences in the industry so far. Our flight was uneventful and after a short layover we were soon boarding a Boeing 767-300 “across the pond” to Frankfurt (the cockpit crew weren’t very nice to me on that flight, the relief pilot didn’t even know Purdue had a flight program). I wasn’t able to get a lot of sleep (~3.5 hours) enroute despite how tired I was, but it was enough to keep from feeling like a zombie the next day.

Saturday

We arrived in Frankfurt Saturday morning, and after a painless trip through customs we met up with Aaron and the IU team. For those of you who don’t know, Aaron is one of two Purdue people on STINT in Freiburg and the older brother of Bekah from Mer’dith. I never really got to know him while he was here, but he’s a good friend of Chip’s and they were really excited to see each other. We trekked through all sorts of tunnels, stairs, and escalators and eventually got to a beautiful glass building to wait for our bullet train to Freiburg.

It wasn’t long before our train came, most of us got a little extra sleep on it, and we got our first look at a rainy, chilly Freiburg:

A look from the Strassenbahn bridge going to the train station:

Bertoldsbrunnen, the Strassenbahn stop that was our main stop in town:

After meeting up with Courtney (“Corndog,” our other Purdue Freiburg STINTer), we got on the Strassenbahn (a streetcar system that makes for an excellent way to get around the city) and rode out to the stop for our hostel. From there it was about a ¾ mile hike with our luggage in tow that we’d repeat every time we wanted to go to or from the hostel. We had a small briefing from the STINT team, checked in to our rooms, and then headed back to downtown via the Strassenbahn for dinner. I ended up going with Corndog and a bunch of IU girls to a local place called Tackles that was known for their Schnitzel. I had the house receipe (Schnitzel with sherry cream sauce and a side of Spätzle noodles) and it was AMAZING. I now officially love Schnitzel. Then we headed back to the hostel and went to bed early to get some much needed sleep.

The girls at Tackles (left to right: Jaime and Shauna from IU and Corndog):

My roommates (Chip, me, Travis, and Shane):

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday

2006-05-14T20:58:00.000-04:00

Sunday

After almost 9 hours of sleep (rare indeed), we rolled out of bed to find a coat of fresh snow covering Freiburg and, cameras in hand, started the trek back to the Strassenbahn so we could go to church.

Walking to the Strassenbahn:

The Black Forest covered in snow:

Fack being, well, Fack, on the Strassenbahn:

Calvary Chapel:

Calvary Chapel is a small English-speaking church where about half of the worship songs are in German and there is a translator for the sermon. We definitely felt a little out-of-place at times, but overall the experience was overwhelmingly awesome, especially to know that even though we might not be able to understand each other, we are worshiping the same God and He doesn’t have any “language barriers.” After church we split up for lunch and I joined a group going to a local Italian place called “Bellas.” We had some really great pizza and Shane was able to catch up with an old friend (Lori, who, if memory serves, is the former roommate of his cousin when they were at Purdue and is now on staff with Crusade at Illinois Catalytic). After lunch we headed back to the hostel, dodging the crowds of people going to the soccer game at the stadium near us (a few people from the team went to the game) and spent some time relaxing in our rooms. Liz and I split off to head back to the stadium so she could buy a scarf (the guy selling them had already packed up and left), and by the time I got back into my room I discovered I was stumbling into a minefield…

Every once in a while, Shane, Chip, Fack, and I (or any combination of the above) will find ourselves with the need to discuss something serious and/or (more rarely) confront one another about something. We’ve taken to referring to having one of these talks as a “pow-wow” and I walked right into the middle of one. Apparently there was some misunderstanding or something (doesn’t really matter) that needed to be talked out and it ballooned into a very fruitful discussion about some related topics and how we approach some of them. I think it was especially interesting for Travis, who’d never seen Christian brothers go at it in such an intense, direct, and yet still loving way. It was also the site of the second instance of me saying something with Fack responding with a “where have you been all my life?!” comment because it was either perfectly tuned to our senses of humor (as in the first case) or especially insightful to the question at hand (as in this one). For those of you who don’t know Fack or the dynamic between us, I consider those lines from him to be very similar to death threats from Toby; something to be treasured and tallied. Anyway, that first pow-wow of the trip ended up being encouraging, fruitful, and helped set a tone of openness for the guys that extended through the rest of the trip.

Later that afternoon we broke into teams for a scavenger hunt around the city to help us get to know the area. A few pics…

My scavenger team (left to right: Emily, Michelle, Mindy, Travis, and Ken from Illinois Catalytic) in front of the Döner place:

My “postcard” shot that turned out way better than expected of the Münster cathedral:

A vertical panorama of the Münster stitched together from three different shots:

I kid you not: a SmartCar convertible!

After getting some food at the Döner place, we all met up at “the office” to get to know the teams from IU and Illinois Catalytic a little before heading back to the hostel (“The office” is the local HQ for Campus für Christus and is an apartment they use for gatherings and the English Café coffeehouse):

Later that night, I was back in the hostel and decided to track a couple of people down to back up their pictures to my portable hard drive. When I found them in the basement, I discovered that I’d stumbled into yet another pow-wow, this time mainly between Fack and Pauline with a few others listening in. I quickly realized two things, the first being that this was going to be another one that I wanted to be a part of, and the second that I was needed to translate Fack-ese (his characteristic style of communicating) into something everyone else would understand clearly and vise-versa (and a little bit of that for Pauline also). The bulk of the conversation consisted of trying to define and clarify the question Fack was asking because there were a lot of misunderstandings with what he was trying to say and we didn’t get very far with finding answers, but I’d still label the whole thing as a success. Moreover, something very important happened while we were down there; Shane got invited to join in a game of Table Foosball (regular foosball for us, but they also use that word for soccer) with some German high school students staying there on a class trip. Eventually they finished the game and Shane went to go hang out with them in another area of the basement for the next few hours. You’ll hear more about them later…

Monday

We started off our morning with a group devotional/praise and worship time, and then dove straight into some basic cultural and evangelistic training:

Then we headed for the Mensas (the cafeterias at the university) to start our ministry time. Shane and I headed to the Science Mensa (one of three at the school and located near the science department, rather than by liberal arts as you might expect…jk). After buying meal cards and putting some money on them, we got our food and started looking for someone to sit down with. Eventually we spotted a late-20’s guy sitting by himself and, practicing one of our newly-learned German lines “Ist heir noch frei?” (“Is this seat free?”), we were able to sit down and start a conversation with him. Now in Germany, they have a very post-modern culture that loves to share ideas (and unlike here; politics and religion are allowed as discussion at the dinner table), but it is often a case of sharing ideas without any intent of looking for new ones to adopt or convincing others of your position. This usually results in people being very open to talking with strangers over just about anything. Sadly, this guy was not one of them. He was a grad student in physics and engaged us in small talk for a little while, but anytime deeper subjects would come up (even just his religious background/beliefs) he would tend to shut down. We did get him talking about the protestant/catholic divide in Germany a little and Shane got into a little bit of a faith vs. works debate with him that taught us a lot about German culture but ultimately got us nowhere with this individual.

That afternoon we met up at the office and split into two different groups. The first group went to a giant tower on a hill overlooking the whole city and the second group (myself included) rode about a half-hour away by train to visit a small town that had the ruins of a ~1000 year-old castle. The castle was at the top of a tall hill and was surrounded by a vineyard. We spent a couple hours hiking to the top of the hill and taking pictures in and around the castle.

The castle:

Hiking up the hill:

A panorama from part way up the hill:

A two-frame panorama of the town:

We think this is going to be his album cover someday:

Don’t fall Mindy!

Fack found a perch about 20ft up inside the castle walls:

The Purdue students and STINTers:

After getting back to Freiburg and getting some dinner, we went to the hostel for Campus Time. Stealing an idea from one of the IU girls I’d overheard mention it, I’d made some special arrangements earlier in the day, so we were able to have a genuine Black Forest cake that evening.

Campus time:

Why they dressed up Lerola's (Fack's guitar) case, I don't know, they were just playing with my camera:

Big eyes:

Then, after some praise and worship, Shane came running into the room demanding our help. He’d been downstairs continuing to build relationships with those high school students and apparently they’d asked him “would you like to learn a cool German dance?” He agreed, one of the kids started playing some music off his laptop for the whole room to dance to, and Shane was stunned to realize that he did already know that particular dance. I kid you not, the 30-40 Germans in the room all got up and started doing the Chicken Dance!! Yep, they thought that regular staple of American barn dances was a German thing. So naturally he ran upstairs and tried to recruit us to go down and join them (I was one of the few who actually did). It was hilarious, and it helped him continue to build those friendships and even begin the process of sharing the gospel with them.

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: Tuesday

2006-05-14T20:57:00.000-04:00

Chip, according to my “expert” opinion (how’s the saying go? “It takes a crook…”), is off his rocker. A perfect example of this is the lengths he’ll go to (and drag others with him) to get a picture. Somehow he got the idea into his head that the view of the city from that tower the other group visited on Monday would be really great at sunrise (because I never disputed that idea, the fact that he was right is entirely irrelevant to this discussion). After being connived into joining this little escapade of his, I rolled out of bed at, uh…really early, along with him, Fack, and Travis to make the trek to the tower. So we caught a Strassenbahn into town and hiked up the winding trails of the probably 300ft hill and then another 75ft or so up the tower itself. I don’t really have any way of conveying to you exactly how high this hill was (and thus how tiring), but it might help your imagination to note that we were rushing up it to try to beat the sun (already over the horizon). It was also one of the coldest times of our trip, so we were quite bundled up with several layers of heavy clothing to keep warm. As a side note before we get to the pictures from the top, we discovered a rather fascinating fact (well, it seemed fascinating to our sleep-deprived and Purdue-squirrel-obsessed minds at the time): Black Forest Squirrels are actually darker in color than our own!

You can’t see it very well, but here’s one of them running away from us:

Alas, it’s not going to show up on here very well, but here’s a ~300 degree panorama of Freiburg I took:

Looking down at my compatriots from the upper (much smaller) platform:

Fack joined me on the upper platform to shoot some video and I caught Chip taking a picture of us:

The same scene from Chip’s camera:

And a really awesome shot of just Fack from Chip’s camera:

The large building near the center of the picture is the soccer stadium by the hostel (hidden behind the hill just left of it):

The sun rising over the Münster:

We got attacked by a werewolf on the way up, but Fack was the only one injured before Chuck Norris showed up to save us:

About halfway down the hill there’s a large metal cross facing the Münster that makes for a great photo-op:

After we got back we had our second round of training and then headed to the Mensas for lunch. Shane and I partnered up again and went to the Main Mensa instead of the Science one like the day before. Even though we never got a spiritual conversation going for more than a few seconds at a time, we had some good discussion with the music major we met about his field and some of the philosophy books he was reading (Nietzsche, if memory serves). We were both encouraged by the conversation because he proved to us that what we’d heard about Germans loving to discuss things was true, something we had questioned after the conversation with the grad student on Monday.

Later that afternoon we went to tour the Münster and climb up its bell tower. Most of my pictures from the inside didn’t turn out because of the low light, but here are a few:

Some artwork over the main entrance:

Inside:
The Allies obliterated Freiburg in WWII, but if you look closely at this 1945 photo, you’ll see something odd. Even though the rest of the city was leveled (including the buildings immediately surrounding the cathedral), the Münster was totally undamaged!

The pipe organ:

The stages of building it showing how the Münster started out as a completely different architectural style and then morphed as the gothic style became popular:

The alter to Mary (totally surrounded by candles):

The front of the sanctuary:

Then we climbed up to the top of the bell tower, where I got this shot of the tower we climbed earlier that morning (a zoomed-in view is inset):

Looking down at the back of the cathedral:

One of the clock towers the Strassenbahn runs under (and a very nice house on the left):

Liz, Pauline, Jessica, and Mindy:

Pauline, Liz, and I:

That night we split for Men’s and Women’s Times. If you haven’t heard of them, they are a traditional Crusade event where the guys and girls split and the topics/discussion/activites/etc are geared toward the specific needs of each group. The guys all went to dinner at Martin’s Brau, a restaurant/microbrewery that fits the American stereotype of German food (bratwurst, pretzels, etc) (I had a dish of three different styles of bratwurst; man that was good):

After dinner we started walking back to the Office for the rest of Men’s Time, but along the way we stopped to watch some teenage street performers break-dance in the lit entrance area of a store along the street. After a few minutes of watching the three of them take turns showing off for the crowd, one of the IU guys challenged II Tim “I’ll give you 2 Euros if you run in there and dance.” II Tim, being, well, II Tim accepted the offer, dashed through to the front of the crowd during a break between the other performers, and immediately started doing one of the most comically bad “robot” dances I’ve ever seen! After dancing for about 10 seconds, he turned around and dashed back out of the center of the crowd. Naturally, the leader of the pack of German teenagers took that as a challenge for a dance-off, started doing a dance to accept the challenge, and tripped! All eyes started watching for II Tim (who now had the upper hand), but he’d disappeared into the night and didn’t even see the guy trip! This blurry picture of him dancing is the only surviving evidence that it actually happened:

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: Wednesday

2006-05-14T20:56:00.000-04:00

Wednesday morning we had a Free Bike Wash outreach by the entrance to the Main Mensa to try to promote English Café, one of the main events of Campus in Freiburg. The idea is kind of like a free car wash, but so few people have cars it wouldn’t make much sense. We got there about 11:30 in the morning and half of us stood outside promoting the bike wash while the other half went inside to witness over lunch as usual, then after about an hour we switched places. Sadly, the Germans didn’t know what to make of us (that type of event is sorta unheard of over there, they don’t know what to make of it when you say you want to wash their bike for free), so I think we only washed 2 or 3 bikes the entire time we were there. We were able to pass out a lot of English Café fliers though, so it wasn’t a complete loss. Here’s Mindy and I holding one of the signs to promote it:

I paired up with II Tim when it was time to head inside for lunch and we sat down by a student who barely knew any English. After talking with him for a little while, we learned that he wasn’t a German at all, but a student from the country of Georgia (no Tiller, not your Georgia; contrary to your Confederate delusions of independent grandeur, this one is actually a country). What we quickly discovered was that his English was almost as bad as our German and his German skills weren’t much better. We struggled to communicate as best as we could, but the language barrier was pretty significant and he wasn’t as interested in talking as normal for Germany.

When we got back outside after lunch, we realized we already had enough people outside that there wasn’t really anything for us to do, so I split off from the group and stepped a little out-of-sight of the group to pray for a while for the outreach. I told 3 or 4 people where I was going so they’d be able to let me know when they decided to pack up and leave, but everyone I told either forgot or left early (assuming someone else would tell me). So by the time I decided to reappear and see what was going on, I discovered the only ones left were the last of the IU people and they were just leaving. We walked back to the Office and they split up to do whatever their individual plans were for that afternoon. I realized that if I decided to just stick at the Office, I’d get bored fast and it would be hours before I’d seen anyone again (one of those times I really missed being able to pull out my cell phone “hey, where are you?”), so I decided to just go exploring on my own a little and hope I’d run into someone I know. In short order, I found myself at Bertoldsbrunnen, randomly picked a direction, and said “I’ll just go this way until I get bored, then I’ll turn around and explore in another direction.”

I started walking south toward Bellas (the Italian restaurant) and eventually walked roughly this course (map from Google Earth)(legend below explaining some of the key points):

Legend:
Blue dot = the Office
Yellow circle = Bertoldsbrunnen
Red = roughly the path I walked
Aqua dot = the “other” cathedral (you’ll see pictures in a minute)
Orange circle = the train station
Green circle = the Münster
Purple circle = the tower we climbed Tuesday morning

I started going south and eventually went as far as another cathedral that I saw from the top of the tower. I went inside, but there was a large gate of metal bars blocking me from going into the sanctuary itself because there was no one there. It was beautiful, not as big or as old as the Münster, but beautiful nonetheless.
The sanctuary:

I tried to make a vertical panorama to show the architecture and despite my pictures being centered down the middle, my stitching software decided to skew to the side a little bit:

The outside (undergoing construction/renovation):

On the way back I decided to go a few blocks to the east and come back through more of a residential area instead of the one of the main streets. Here’s a nice picture from the bridge I took over the river:

Nice, quiet neighborhood:

I think this beautiful building was a school:

A little canal going through one of the streets:

Street performers (they were all over the city):

I wandered back to Bertoldsbrunnen, west to the train station (the only people I ran into that I knew were some Illinois girls by Portofinos), then north around the Münster as far east as the base of the tower hill and then headed back to the Office. This was a couple of blocks from the Münster (and yes, that’s the last of the snow from a couple of days ago):

I got back to Bertoldsbrunnen just in time to meet up with everyone else and head to dinner (apparently my afternoon-long absence had gone entirely unnoticed). I ended up joining the group headed for Schlappen, a local restaurant that serves a lot of food from the Black Forest region and has a bit of a reputation among everyone I’ve met who’s been to Freiburg. There is a pit in the middle of the sink area of the men’s restroom that has a mock dungeon (complete with skeleton) covered only by a grate in the floor. But that’s not the real reason for this restaurant’s infamous reputation; the real reason (which I won’t share here for space and decency reasons) is also related to the men’s restroom. It’s not really gross, but it is weird (ask me about it if you want to know). Anyway, here’s that dungeon:

Christina (aka, “Teenie,” one of the STINTers), myself, and Aaron from IU:

Regina (wearing black) is one of the key student leaders for Campus in Freiburg. She actually grew up in the same town (and I think she even went to the same school as a kid) as Martin Luther:

After dinner we all met up back at the Office to hang out for a while:

After stopping at Milano to get some really good ice cream, a bunch of us went over to the Münster to get some night pictures of it. Lacking a tripod, I had to lay flat on my back on the cobblestone pavement and try to hold the camera still enough against my chest to get a sharp ¼ second exposure. In case you’ve never done that, it’s really hard! (If it boggled your mind how I was able to take over 900 pictures this trip, it was stuff like this that made those numbers so high) The others also thought I was about to get run over by a car at one point while I was laying there. One shot failed when Liz decided to walk over and stick her head in the frame to talk to me:

But, I eventually did get a nice one:

Then we headed back to the hostel and hung out for a while because we couldn’t get into our room. Shane had headed back earlier in the evening to continue to spend time with those high school students I’d mentioned earlier (he’d been down there until all hours every night since we met them). He’d taken our room key so he could get Chip’s video camera and do some interviews with them about what they believed and hopefully use that to transition to the gospel after the camera was off. My understanding is that the night went well; several of them heard the gospel again (he’d already shared it once or twice in bits and pieces during the week) and some were even close to trusting Christ, but it was their last night in town and they were more interested in partying than praying. Because he had our room key; Chip, Travis, and I couldn’t get into our room, so we hung out with some of the girls in one of the classrooms on the main level:
Michelle, do you feel surrounded?

Naturally, Liz and Emily, the two most photographed people on the team (aka, the two that craved the attention of the lens and would pose whenever one came out) had to get a couple pictures together:

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: Thursday

2006-05-14T20:55:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, Chip was the crazy one with his hike to the tower; Thursday, I was. A German guy I’d talked to sometime during the week (maybe in the Mensa, but I can’t remember) had told me that he sometimes goes to the Münster really early in the morning (around 6am) to pray when there isn’t anyone there. That gave me an idea to follow through with one of those “wouldn’t it be sweet if….?” ideas I’d had earlier in the week. As we were walking around in the Münster on Tuesday, I’d been thinking “wouldn’t it be sweet to have real, passionate worship like we have at Cru or ECC in a building like this?” So 5 or 6 of us made plans to get up really early and head into town at dawn on Thursday with Fack’s guitar (and Fack, I suppose) to try to get into the cathedral and have a worship session.

Come Thursday morning, I head downstairs to meet with the group in the main lobby, only to discover that Anna was the only other person dedicated enough to actually get up (not surprisingly, even Fack overslept). After waiting around for ten or fifteen minutes in hopes that someone else would show up, we decided to give up and I headed back to bed (although Anna stayed up and read for a couple hours; crazy morning person).

After a couple hours of very pleasant sleep, I got up again and we all headed to the “Challenge Breakfast” put on by the STINT team. It was pretty much a standard Crusade recruitment session, including pushes to go on summer project (especially in Freiburg) and to consider going on STINT. It was held at a local bakery/coffee shop and breakfast included a croissant (plain or nut…come on people…WHERE’S THE CHOCOLATE?!) and a coffee or hot tea. I’m already going on project and I’ve heard all the rest of the spiel before, so the majority of what they were talking about didn’t apply to me. I did learn one really good piece of news though. One of the main purposes of having a STINT team is to help get a ministry established and pave the way for International Campus Staff (ICS) to come in and help local student leaders run the ministry from there. By the fall of 2008, there will be no STINT team in Freiburg! They are busy making arrangements for ICS to come in and help Germans like Anzie and Regina lead the ministry while Crusade starts looking for their next location to start a ministry in Germany (Berlin maybe?). So yeah, the elimination of the STINT team shows just how far along the ministry in Freiburg has come and is really good news. The downside is that Pauline was sure that she’d be on STINT in Freiburg in a couple of years, but now it won’t be an option and she has to consider elsewhere (although a bunch of us on the team are pretty sure where she’ll end up).

As soon as we got done with “breakfast,” we headed over to the Mensa for lunch. I paired up with Mindy and we sat down with a girl named Caroline to eat. She was very nice and friendly toward us, but most attempts at a spiritual conversation were deflected pretty quickly. If my memory is correct, she’d grown up going to a catholic school, but didn’t really believe in Christianity. She knew “all about” what protestants believe from what she’d learned in school, but it was pretty clear she didn’t really understand. As an attempt to explain what we believed, Mindy pulled out a German version of the 4 Spiritual Laws booklet we use for witnessing a lot in Crusade and started going through it with her. I think we got as far as Law 2 before Caroline decided she had somewhere better to be and left, but I think we had gotten her interested enough in the English Café earlier in the conversation that she might come to that. So we prayed for her, finished our lunch, and headed outside to meet up with some others from our group.

After going to a local bookstore where Anzie worked to get some souvenirs of Albert Ludwig University and bug Anzie, I joined up with Liz, Jessica, and Aaron from IU to go visit the Medieval Torture Museum. It wasn’t really worth the €3.80 student cost to get in, but it was still, shall we say, interesting (and not a little gross at times). Typically each “device” would be accompanied with a description of what it was and how it was used in German (and about half of them also had English translations) and usually had a simple drawing of it in use. Some highlights...

You can probably guess how this chair worked. If memory serves, I think it was used during the Inquisition to force confessions out of people:

Want to grow an extra few inches?

“She’s a witch!!!” If your first thought upon seeing this WASN’T Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, then, quite frankly, I’m not sure we can still be friends. I kid you not, what you see here is a set of scales used to weigh suspected witches. Apparently the theory was that witches were somehow less dense than the rest of us, so somehow they would figure out how much she should weigh and compare it with her actual weight. If she was too light, I believe the typical result was, as Strong Bad would put it, “burnination.”

Partway down the stairs there was a creepy-looking suit of armor that scared Liz half to death. You can’t tell by this picture, but the lighting was so dim it was almost black in the staircase (safety hazard = very yes), which made the suit look that much creepier because you could barely see it. I used my camera to take a picture of it so I could show her it was ok (she was scared enough to declare that she wasn’t going down the stairs unless one of us went first, and even then she might not) and then used the focus-assist light on the camera to illuminated my way as we went down.

A guillotine:

Aaron trying on the noose for size:

I stopped taking pictures at this point because the items on display were getting grosser and grosser the farther we went in. Jessica and I didn’t even let Liz into the last room because of how disgusting one particular torture device was (and no, I won’t describe it here).

I can’t remember what the significance of this building was (I think it used to be town hall or a marketplace or something like that):

Look a little closer at the statues and you’ll see that they are holding something. Not only did we find the Scales in the torture museum, but this knight next door is holding the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!” Yes, I know that the whole cross-on-sphere thing had some sort of symbolic/artistic meaning that I can’t remember, but can you really fault me for thinking of Monty Python at this point?

Then we went to a free art museum near the office. On the ground floor there were some statues, gargoyles, and stained glass windows, but nothing terribly impressive. But then we found the stairs to the upper levels and discovered that it was actually a really nice museum. One of the things we found was a room full of paintings from the same guy that looked like they were photographs from any farther than a few feet away. I didn’t get the name of the artist, but here’s an example:

I also found a couple of paintings by the impressionist Goebel. If you haven’t already figured it out from talking to me, I’m a sucker for impressionists:

Some people napping back at the Office:

Dinner at Bellas:

Aaron from IU:

Shane, Anna, and I:

Ah, the joys of digital camera technology: everyone’s gotta look at their pictures instead of being social at the dinner table:

Look at that smirk:

Anna and Travis on the Strassenbahn:

Inside joke:

For our last night in Freiburg we all got together with the STINT team and Anzie and Regina to do a little praise and worship, favorite memories skits, light debriefing, etc. Here’s Anzie and one of the IU guys leading worship:

Ken from Illinois Catalytic:

The STINT team:

Emily and Liz messing around:

Fack and Anzie having a nice, “civil” discussion wherein Fack was “persuading” Anzie to go on STINT (picture from Chip):

Corndog (Courtney) and AJ, our two Purdue/Freiburg STINTers (picture from Chip):

Regina and Anzie, two German Campus student leaders (picture from Chip):

Illinois Catalytic and the STINT team (picture from Chip):

IU and the STINT team (picture from Chip):

Purdue and the STINT team (picture from Chip’s camera, but not Chip (he’s in the shot)):

We were going to have to leave at 7:30am the next day to catch our train out of town, but I didn’t really want to pack up and go to bed when I could spend more time hanging out with people. So as we were dispersing from that final meeting and taking pictures, I started telling everyone who was interested to get their stuff packed up and then meet in the basement at midnight. I was hoping that attendance would turn out better than Münster Worship that morning, but when I got downstairs I again found myself alone with the ever-reliable Anna wondering if anyone else would come. It actually ended up being really cool because we got to talking about the different ways that God had brought each of us to Freiburg and then as people began to slowly trickle in they’d join the conversation and tell their own stories. After a while, everyone of the 15 or 20 people present who wanted to share a story had, so we split up into a couple of different groups to play card games and people began drifting away to bed.

You can tell Liz and Shauna (head down in the white hoodie) are beginning to get tired:

Brian and Matt from IU playing Euchre:

Matt from IU:

Shawn and Shauna:

Freiburg: 2nd Friday

2006-05-14T20:54:00.000-04:00

We had to be at the Freiburg train station by about 7:30, so by the time we accounted for walking to the Strassenbahn, riding the Strassenbahn, the usual allotment of “Cru time” for people being late, and of course the special allotment of “Fack time” specifically for our temporally-challenged team member (“Fack time” = “Cru time” x 2.5), we had to tell people to be in the hostel lobby and ready to leave by 6:30. Everyone was reasonably on time and we managed to arrive at the train station right at 7:30.

As a preview, the plan for our “travel day” was to take a train most of the way to Ludwicksburg, make a hurried switch to another track to get the rest of the way there (I think we had 8 minutes between arriving and departing), tour Ludwicksburg for a couple hours, train to Stuttgart, tour there for the afternoon and most of the evening, and then train to Frankfurt where we had a hostel lined up for the next couple of nights.

Our tickets said that our train would leave on a certain track at 7:57, so after waiting in the cold for twenty minutes, we were quite glad to see the sign say that our train was pulling in at 7:50. We got on, found our seats, and were not a little confused when the train pulled out of the station at 7:53 (keep in mind that Germans are famous worldwide for being immaculately punctual). When the lady came around to get our tickets a few minutes later, we found out that we had in fact gotten on the wrong train. In a show of precise timing as only the Germans could do, there were two trains leaving the same station, on the same track, going to the same destination, and they were doing it all 7 minutes apart. The good news from that revelation came from the ticket lady, who told Chip that while normally it would be a huge problem to have us on the wrong train, today it wouldn’t be a big deal and we could get away with it. The added bonus was that we got to the station where we would switch trains that much sooner, so we didn’t have to rush as much for the next train.

“Surfing” the connection between two cars as we waited to stop for our 2-minute window to get off the train:

Mindy, what are you doing? II Tim looks scared:

Emily smiles for the picture, but Mindy just keeps on making faces at II Tim:

Got some interesting shots when I let Emily play with the camera for a while:

Anna:

Michelle:

Fack:

Fack again (holding, of course, a travel edition of Settlers of Catan):

Sound asleep:

Pauline’s a thinker:

We arrived in Ludwicksburg and immediately set out to find the local palace, nicknamed the “Versailles of Swabia” because of its strong architectural resemblance to Versailles in Paris. Along the way, we discovered a large square with two churches across from each other. One was Protestant and one was Catholic and they were faced off from each other almost as if they were in a duel. It won’t show up well, but here’s a little panorama I stitched together of the scene:

Mindy and II Tim by the fountain in the middle of the square:

Some pictures from the middle of the main courtyard of the palace:

We couldn’t go in the main museum area because they only let people in on tours (which took longer than we had in the city and were expensive), but there was a mini-museum on the theater of the palace that was free to wander about in. We weren’t the only ones wandering about in it, we found this cat just sitting on one of the ledges of the main staircase about 30 feet over the ground floor:

Fancy chandelier:

One of the very Versailles-like gardens outside:

After wandering around the palace for a while, we headed back to the train station so we could leave for Stuttgart. This time we did get on the right train, although it was a short enough ride that we just stood with our stuff instead of trying to find seats:

Our first priority upon reaching Stuttgart was to find some food. We wandered around a little bit and soon stumbled upon a McDonalds. Yep, we had McDonalds, in Germany. You know how they say that English is the universal language for air traffic control around the world, but you go anywhere else (think Asia) and it’s like no English you’ve ever heard? Yeah, McDonalds is kind of like that. It’s just different enough to be really similar but also really weird. For example, just like every other establishment in Germany, they have beer; McDonalds brand beer to be exact (and no, for the record, none of us got it). Or the Quarter Pounder is called the Royale (although I suppose it would be kind of strange to go to the drive through and ask for the “113 gram-er;” gotta love the metric system). Fortunately for us, the lady working the counter at the line we got in spoke excellent English, so we weren’t completely lost in trying to order food (especially trying to make a special order to fit Fack’s strict diet).

Then we had to choose if we were going to the Porsche Museum or the Staasgallerie Art Museum. We’d already split up into several smaller groups for the afternoon and mine consisted of Fack, Chip, Pauline, Liz, II Tim, and myself. We ended up deciding to go to the Staasgallerie, but then had not a little trouble finding it. Even after asking locals for directions we were thoroughly confused. Turns out there are a series of buildings that are part of the Staasgallerie, like a theater, music hall, etc. Even after we found the actual art museum building itself, it took us nearly a half hour just to find the entrance! I’m serious; the building was one of those fancy modern-style architecture buildings and had no apparent logical place to go inside or signs directing you to the entrance. Eventually we ran into a couple of Germans who had just left it and could tell us where to go.

We were really excited because we had seen giant ads up all over the city that there was a touring Monet exhibit coming to the museum (as you already know, I’m a sucker for impressionists, but Monet is by far my favorite, so I was psyched). But once we got inside we found out that the exhibit was going to run from May to September, so our hopes were dashed. The museum started out with the newest, most recent materials and then went back in time as you progress, so we wandered through a few rooms of strange abstract “art” (some of it was really nice, but the majority was…yeah, we won’t go there) , stopped at a room featuring a half-hour long video of Rube Goldberg type machinations, and then arrived in the Picasso room. First, a picture of the first thing you see when you get to the actual gallery part of the museum (II Tim absolutely loved this piece)(picture from Chip):

The Rube Goldberg-esque video (actually a series of clips with a certain piece designed as a cut scene to make it look like one giant contraption)(picture from Chip). If memory serves, the jug of water streams into the bucket below, raising the float enough to tip the chair into the pot on the table, and so on and so forth…

A few Picasso shots from Chip:

I don’t know quite what to call the style of this particular painting by André Derain (maybe a cross between pointillism and impressionism?), but I thought it was pretty cool:

Yeah, I love Monet (are we beginning to pick up a common theme here?):

This sculpture was really creepy because when we first walked into the room we all thought she was real (picture from Chip):

Now for the funniest part of our time in the museum; we walked into a room and saw these three busts on pedestals and Chip decided to involve someone in the shot to give a sense of scale for how big they are, so he asked Pauline to go over and stand by them. She walks over to the one on the left and puts her elbow up by the top of the pedestal to look like she’s leaning on it from the camera’s perspective. She didn’t actually touch it, but the docent in the room thought she had and flipped out. She comes running over yelling at the very bewildered Pauline in German and after a few seconds of chewing her out realizes she doesn’t understand, so she started all over in English. Turns out those busts aren’t anchored to the pedestal, nor are the pedestals anchored to the floor in any way, so it would be quite easy for the whole thing to tip over and destroy the artwork. Pauline was quite apologetic and visibly shaken (although not nearly as shaken as the docent who looked like she’d had a heart attack), but that didn’t stop any of us from making jokes about it afterward. I don’t know if they had radios or what, but from then on every docent in the museum watched us like hawks. Pauline even got yelled at again because she leaned against a wall while looking at a particularly huge altarpiece and apparently one isn’t allowed to lean against blank walls in an art museum. Chip's picture before Pauline gave the docent a heart attack:

A Rembrandt:

At one point we were sitting on a couch taking a break and looking at the pieces in the room when I noticed that Chip was standing right next to me with his camera hanging at his side just a few inches from my face. I mean really, what do you expect me to do, ignore it and go on with my life like a normal person? No! Of course I reached up, pointed it in my general direction (not easy considering its size and that I had no real grip on it) and pressed the trigger. Naturally, I wasn’t expecting it to turn out at all, but the result was good enough that I even put a small version of it on the airplane section of my summer project support letter:

Chip decided to take similar up-close shots of everyone present (I took the one of him, but these are all from Chip’s camera like the one above):

After we left the museum we spent a substantial amount of time wandering around looking for food, but being unable to find anything appealing it was back to McDonalds for us. You could tell Fack was pretty exhausted by the way he passed out on the table (we found a balloon on a stick and Emily managed to stick it in his hat and dreads without him noticing, even after he’d woken up):

Liz:

We headed back to the train station and boarded our ride to Frankfurt. There was some confusion about which car we were supposed to be on (and people being in our assigned seats that didn’t want to move) and combining that with people being pretty tired and worn out made it a more stressful time than it needed to be. We eventually got to Frankfurt and found our hostel for the next two nights just a block away from the train station. The hostel wasn’t in the best part of town, but we set up some fairly strict rules to keep everyone safe and we didn’t have any problems. The hostel was filled to capacity so we had to cram all our guys into one fairly small room (fitting all seven of us and our stuff in there was a challenge to say the least) and the girls split more comfortably between two rooms down the hall.

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: 2nd Saturday

2006-05-14T20:53:00.000-04:00

Because we didn’t really have anything on the agenda for Saturday other than our debriefing in the evening, most of us readily seized the opportunity to sleep in a little. Liz wanted to take us to see Old Frankfurt, a picturesque area of a few square blocks right near downtown that she remembered from a previous visit to Germany as a small kid just a couple of years ago (just kidding Liz). Some people decided to stay back and spend the day reading and praying instead of touring, while the Navigators in the group (Mindy and until-recently II Tim) spent the day visiting Phil, a Nav guy that I know from Cary Quad (I even had an econ class with him freshman year) who is on an internship in Berlin, who’d come over to Frankfurt for the day to see us.

The group who wanted to go touring had said we were going to leave around 11am, but that really didn’t happen. Nobody was ready to go at the appointed time, so we pushed it back a half hour or so and then I managed to get into another pow-wow with Chip, Shane, Fack, and I Tim. It was actually a really good one but it kept us busy for about another hour, so we ended up making the girls wait before we could leave for Old Frankfurt.

Hey, what can I say, she’s from Frankfurt (the IL version though):

A square we walked by with some really weird trees:

I thought this Mini-Cooper ad was hilarious:

Along the way we came across a small anti-war demonstration marching through one of the main streets. It wasn’t an anti-Iraqi war protest mind you, but an anti-Iran war protest. Evidently they thought we were about to start something over there. Note that some of the signs in the second picture have a picture of President Bush and label him “Terrorist No. 1.” Oh well, you have to expect at least some delusions out of them considering they represented the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany.

Old Frankfurt:

We decided we were hungry, but we couldn’t find anything we all agreed on that was within our price range (being a touristy area, the stuff around Old Frankfurt was pretty expensive). I however got lucky and found a little crêperie that was just like that ones I remember in France where they make it right in front of you. It wasn’t enough to fill me up, but the ham-and-cheese crêpe I got was absolutely delicious. Emily got one with bananas and Nutella (a sort of chocolate spread really popular in Europe). The Harrison people with us (Travis, Emily, and Michelle) decided to split off from Liz, Jessica, Shane, and I to head back to the hostel and get Anna who’d stayed back to have some quiet time by herself. As we wandered in the general direction of the Main River, we came across a small church that was styled like a miniature cathedral and stopped to take a few pictures:

Across the river was this church (we didn’t go in, just took pictures from the bridge) and a flea market we stopped to walk around (and yes, that is a 747 you see in the background to the left of the steeple):

I couldn’t believe it, but I found this ancient Commodore 286 laptop on a table at the flea market. What was even more amazing was that it wasn’t for sale; it was in fact being used by the owner of that booth! As a sense of perspective for those of you not technically inclined, that computer was considered ancient when my “ancient” Pentium 133 laptop was considered hot stuff circa 1995 (which, as a side note, I just recently turned into a digital picture frame instead of throwing it in the garbage like my mom wanted).

When we got to the end of the 3 or 4 block long flea market, we decided to wander back farther into the residential area that it was next to. After walking just a block in, and a couple blocks parallel to the river, we came across a red building with “Mt 5, 2-10” in giant letters on the front. Recognizing it as a scripture reference (the Beatitudes, to be specific), we went inside and figured out it was a little Bible museum for children. Not really wanting to pay admission for a museum that appeared geared for the 5-10 crowd, we went into the bookstore and had a fun time trying to talk with the guys working there.
Shane and Liz (you can see the museum on the right):

As we left, we decided to start making our way back to meet up with everyone and took a shortcut through a small park between the museum and the flea market area. As we were walking through the little park, we passed a bunch of benches in a circle around a little sculpture or something (seemed the perfect place for a small fountain, but there was no sign of water) and noticed a bunch of empty wine bottles half hidden under the benches. After discussing for a moment how bad litter is, Shane (ever the entrepreneur) commented “hey, we should pick all those up, you can get money for recycling them!” To which I responded “Shane, do you really want to be seen walking around with an armful of empty wine bottles?” Shane answered: “We’re in Germany, what are the chances we’ll see anyone we know?” At that point I burst out laughing and he said “oh nevermind,” because what should happen in the middle of his proclamation of our anonymity but we should see the Harrison group we split off from earlier crossing our path not 20 yards away! Yep, two miles and a river away from our hostel we ran into Travis, Emily, Anna, and Michelle at the most ironic possible moment. This picture was taken by Michelle just seconds later (you can even see the sheepish grin on Shane’s face as we were laughing about it):

At that point it was about time for us to head back to the meeting point we’d arranged earlier in the day so we could figure out our dinner plans. So we found our way back (not an easy task in that city) and waited on benches for the rest of the group to arrive:

I took Shane’s picture, but he decided he didn’t like the shot of him slouching, so he had me retake it again and again, with each shot getting successfully more posed:

“I’m too slouched, retake it!” Ok…

“That just looks weird, let’s try me thinking.” Ok…

Then I suggested a “the thinker” shot angled from below (and yes, I actually laid on the ground to get it):

He still didn’t like it, so we gave up after shooting what I took to calling his “senior portrait”…

Jessica:

Liz:

Phil from Navs:

Eventually the rest of the group arrived and we split into a couple different groups to find food. I ended up going with largest group (led by the Nav contingent: Phil, Mindy, and II Tim) in hopes of finding some Schnitzel on our last night in Germany. We spent the next half hour to 45 minutes (a substantial chunk of the time we had to eat before our deadline to be back at the hostel) wandering aimlessly around under their direction (and prompting a couple of “this is what happens when you let the Navigators navigate…” jokes). Eventually we found a little restaurant off the beaten path that took forever to make our food, but ended up being some really good Schnitzel. Waiting for the food:

Chip wasn’t ready preparing for our debriefing session by the time we got back to the hostel, so we ended up hanging out in one of the other rooms while we waited. Liz decided to take a little nap (and I think Jessica might have dozed off once or twice):

Awww…

After a while, we all moved to another, larger room where we’d have our debriefing, but then we still had to wait a bit before Chip would be ready. It was still crowded in there, but we all managed to fit in:

Again, Liz decided to get some sleep, but at some point her teddy bear was switched out for her shoe and she caught me trying to get a picture of it (second shot):

Some other random shots of people around the room:

We finally started our debriefing with some praise and worship lead by JD (including singing the trip’s unofficial theme song “Marvelous Light”). Then we started discussing things like what went well, what didn’t go so well, what we’d learned spiritually, how we’d seen God work, etc. All told, even though we didn’t see anyone come to Christ during our trip, we could wholeheartedly declare the trip a massive success on a number of levels. We saw a lot of growth within our team spiritually, many of our team members got a new or renewed passion for the nations and missions, one person decided to sign up for summer project who wasn’t planning on going prior to our trip (Michelle, who’s going back to Freiburg), Pauline’s perspective on her plans for STINT in a couple of years changed dramatically (she was positive that she’d be going to Freiburg, but they won’t have a Freiburg STINT by the time she wants to go, she is much more open to wherever God takes her, and she’s got a pretty good idea where she might end up going), we built new friendships within our team that are still ongoing (and strengthened existing ones), we were a huge encouragement to the STINT team and to the German students involved in Campus, the gospel was presented numerous times, Shane’s convinced several of those high school-ers were close to accepting Christ by the time they left, several German students are now interested in going to the English Café hosted at the Office, and so on and so forth. I’ve even forgotten a lot of our reasons (Freiburg people: please add more by posting comments to this post!), but by the end of the evening we all felt pretty confident calling the trip a massive success and praising God for all that He’d done in and through us.

In the middle of our debriefing, we heard a knock on the door and found out that Illinois Catalytic would be spending the night in the same hostel as us. I don’t know if it was some sort of coincidence that we ended up in that hostel or the STINT team put it together (likely because of our ease of getting to the airport from that location), but IU had been there Friday night before flying out Saturday and now Illinois was going to be with us Saturday night. The only problem was that Ken, a staff guy, was the only guy on their ten-person team, so he was probably going to have to cram into the Purdue guys’ already filled-to-past-capacity room just to have a place to stay. In the end, the girls from their team got placed in a room two floors above us, which was far enough away that they didn’t want to be cut off from a guy in that not-so-great neighborhood, so he stayed with them instead of us.

After spending a little time checking my email in the computer lab (and keeping a protective eye on our girls until they finished using them computers), I finally got to bed for my last night in Germany.

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: 2nd Sunday

2006-05-14T20:52:00.000-04:00

We rolled out of bed early and got our stuff together to leave the hostel and head for the airport. As usual, it took some people (specifically those named Fack, jk) longer than others to pack up, but we added enough buffer time into our plans to get everyone downstairs and head for the train station. A few of the people who were ready on the earlier side waiting for everyone else in the hostel lobby:

Early February the team had a deadline to say for sure if they were coming on the trip or not (I think they had to turn in a deposit by a certain time on a certain day) in order for us to all get on the same flights to and from Germany at a relatively decent rate. Travis and Emily missed that deadline and I wasn’t added onto the team until a week later, so by the time Chip tried to get us tickets the team’s flight back to the States was full and we had to take a different route home. Instead of flying from Frankfurt to JFK in New York and then onto Indianapolis; the three of us on “bravo team” had to go through Atlanta.

All three of us had bought Albert-Ludwigs Universität (Albert Ludwig University, where we did most of our ministry) track jackets while in Freiburg, so we decided to wear them for the trip back. Travis also decided to wear the white Adidas that he bought:

Wait, then again, so did Emily (I assure you, they definitely got their fair share of teasing over buying the same shoes):

Waiting for our train to the Frankfurt airport about 15 minutes away (pictures from Liz):

Shortly after we got onto the train, Liz realized that she’d somehow forgotten her backpack on the platform during the rush to get all of our stuff onto the train and panicked. I don’t recall what items of importance she had in it, but she did have her passport on her person, so it wasn’t a total disaster. She insisted that she wasn’t leaving Germany without it, but according to Chip there wouldn’t be enough time for her to ride back to the central station, try to find it, and come back to the airport and still make our flight. Once we got to the airport, we were relieved to find that II Tim had spotted it on the platform as we boarded and grabbed it not knowing if it was from our team or not (we had to split up between two cars, so there was no way for him to tell us he had it enroute).

When we checked in at the airport for our flight, Travis decided to pick up a rather annoying habit of getting searched at every opportunity. We had to go through a little security checkpoint before they’d let us up to the counter for a little screening, and they decided to pull him (and a couple others) aside to dig through all their checked baggage looking for who-knows-what. Apparently the guy who searched Shane couldn’t understand why he’d want to buy a giant map of Germany to hang on his wall back home (he has a thing for maps, what can I say?). Then, after we’d gone through the usual metal detector screening usually associated with airports, we split off from the rest of the team and headed for our gate. Along the way there was another little security checkpoint and they decided to search both Travis and Emily (I didn’t get searched at any point on the trip, but I think they gave me the wand at that checkpoint). I don’t know why we (mainly Travis) got searched so much, maybe it had something to do with us all being dressed the same or they were just bored, but it was kinda funny. I don’t know if you’re technically allowed to take a picture like this, but while I was waiting for them I discretely pulled out my camera and got a shot of the guy searching Emily’s backpack after releasing Travis:

After waiting for about 45 minutes for our plane to arrive (where I tried to get some studying done for my big exam in Advanced Navigation at 7:30 the following morning), we boarded our Boeing 777 to Atlanta. As I’d done with our flights to Germany, I used my status as a Purdue flight student to sweet talk my way into the cockpit while the rest of the passengers boarded the plane. Simply put, the 777 is pretty sweet. When I got back to my seat, I found that I was sitting a row behind and across the aisle from Travis and Emily, so I could see them but not really interact much for the 9.5 hours it’d take us to get to Atlanta.

Nine and a half hours is a long time, especially if you’re going to be sitting in one spot for the majority of it, but thankfully boredom wasn’t going to be an option for me because they had those cool seat-back TV screens and because I had work to do that I’d soon discover wasn’t going to get done. There were two things I’d like to have gotten done on that flight, the one being study for my Advanced Nav exam (which I knew wasn’t happening already because it was all chart work and there’s no way to spread out a giant aviation map on a tray table) and the second was a bit of a special project. Our plan was to have each guy buy a bunch of postcards in Germany and write an encouraging note to each of the girls who were on our team and then give them out once we got back to Lafayette, so I was going to work on writing those postcards during the flight.

The reason those things weren’t going to get done was a ten-year-old kid named JP. JP was sitting next to me (traveling alone) on his way back home to his divorced Mom in Dallas, Texas. He’d just spent his 4th grade spring break visiting his Dad on an American military base in Germany. After getting to know him a little bit at the start of the flight, I soon discovered that he didn’t have a verbal “off” switch; he just kept talking. The only time that he would be quiet for any length of time was during the first in-flight movie (Chicken Little) and during the first showing of SpongeBob SquarePants (they showed the same episode 3 or 4 times over the course of the flight), and even then he wouldn’t keep quiet for long.

At one point I looked across the aisle and noticed the middle-aged lady across from me reading Revolution in World Missions by K.P. Yohannan, a book that I own but haven’t read (it was given to me at the Urbana Conference a couple years ago). Guessing she was a believer, I introduced myself, learned her name was Brenda, and we started talking about the book, my missions trip, and some of the other things Crusade was doing over spring break (like the ~3000 students who went to help with hurricane relief). I think it was really encouraging for both of us because we were able to meet as complete strangers on an airplane and within a couple of minutes we were no longer strangers but instead we were siblings in Christ talking about how God was working around the world.

A little while after that I got to talking with JP again and began to wonder (aka, be nudged by the Spirit to wonder…) if there was a deeper purpose for his inability to keep quiet. Over the course of our numerous earlier conversations (it was getting to be 6 or 7 hours in the air at this point), I’d tried asking him about if he went to church and other “deeper” questions, but hadn’t really gotten very far (he and his mom went to church occasionally, but he didn’t really have any idea what it meant to be a Christian or who Jesus is). I eased into the topic again and soon found myself trying to translate from memory the Would You Like to Know God Personally? (formerly called The Four Spiritual Laws, Campus Crusade’s favored gospel presentation tool) booklet into language that a 10 year-old could understand. It took a while (and a lot of jumping back and forth in the concepts) for him to really grasp it, but thankfully we had plenty of time and by the time and it wasn’t long before I became fully convinced that he understood the gospel and was in a place of being ready to make a decision. So I asked him if he wanted to accept Christ as his Savior and… (scroll down)

…he said “yes.”!!! So I asked him a few more questions to double check that he understood the question and make sure he wasn’t feeling pressured but actually wanted to accept Christ, and then, somewhere between New York and Philadelphia at 38,000ft, we prayed together and JP became a new brother in Christ!!!

Right after telling Brenda what’d happened, I handed her my camera and she took what became my last picture from the trip: JP and I just moments after he’d joined the Kingdom of God:

I introduced him to Travis and Emily and exchanged contact information, and once we were on the ground in Atlanta the four of us gathered around him and prayed for him. I think the whole thing was especially cool because we’d declared the night before that the trip was a massive success even though no one had come to Christ, and then someone did!

We got off the plane and after collecting our baggage, taking it through customs, and re-checking it, we went to find our gate for the trip to Indy. We had about an hour layover so we made a couple calls to tell people we’d arrived safely (and to find out that Tiller’s hopes to come see us at the airport fell through) and went to find some American food and Pepsi products (virtually unheard-of in Germany). It may have been overpriced, but my Subarro pizza was definitely tasty, and then, of course, there was the Mountain Dew! (seriously, I’m not addicted! I just really, really, really, really, really, etc like it!!! jk)

Before long we were on our flight to Indy (and yes, I went up to the cockpit on that flight too) and I got stuck sitting at the opposite end of the MD-80 airplane from Travis and Emily. It was turbulent pretty much the entirety of the 1.5 hour flight, so I wasn’t able to get any real writing done for the postcards like I’d hoped. Then, before we knew it, we were back in Indy waiting for the rest of the team to arrive a half hour later.

Liz’s Dad, who’d driven us from Lafayette in their church people mover, picked us up and drove us back to Purdue. Just as we were about to arrive in the Purdue Airport parking lot, my cell phone rang and I recognized that the area code was the same one that JP said he was from, so I answered it and found that it was his mom calling to thank me for sharing the gospel with him during our flight. I got the feeling that she probably isn’t a believer (or that she’s not really walking with Christ if she is), but she said that he’d gotten home a couple hours before and told her all about our flight and that she could already see a difference in him! We chatted for a couple more minutes and I made sure to encourage her to get involved with a local church before we got off the phone. I’d given him a copy of the booklet after we prayed together so he could show her (at the very least so she’d have an idea what he’s talking about and not worry that I was from a cult or something), so hopefully they’ll look at it together and it might help her move toward Christ if she’s not walking with the Lord. Then we got to the Purdue Airport, unloaded our stuff, said goodbye, and went our separate ways.

At that point our amazing trip to Freiburg, Germany was over. I had to jump my car because the battery had died over the course of the week and headed to the Quad to try to get in some studying for my major 7:30am midterm. After about a half hour of failing miserably at my efforts to process any of the material, I realized that my brain was completely fried after being up for about 24 hours and gave up to get some sleep about 11:30.

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Freiburg: The Quote Book

2006-05-14T20:51:00.000-04:00

Here are some of the more memorable quotes from the Freiburg trip. Some of them are inside jokes, some are be-there jokes, and some are funniest when they’re completely out of context like they are here. If you have any more to add, please add a comment to this post.

Shawn: “We are Tarkington inbound; ETA six and a half minutes!”

Mindy to Travis: “Why are you standing on 20 Euro?”

Mindy: “Do Germans smile?”

Fack: “Gawk subtly!”

Shane: “Don’t laugh at me; I slept up too late.”

Aaron Jones: “Courtney, what are you doing?! Don’t break the train!”

Fack: “Don’t fall off the battlements Fack!”

II Tim: “I will PUT the fear of the Lord in you!”

“We’re in Illinois, and I can see the Empire State Building.” –Emily…a moment later, realizing what she just said…“Can I be in the quote book?”

Shane: “They say, you are what you eat.”
Fack: “Maybe you should lay off the fruitcake.”

I Tim: “On our travel day, can we go to Iowa?”
Chip: “NO! Well…you could walk there; it’s, uh, [points] that way.”
I Tim: “So, walk a long way, then swim even longer, and I’ll see you guys at my memorial service?”
Chip: “Exactly!”

Travis: “Second Timothy didn’t seem to like it when I had my arm around him. Maybe it was because it was on the Strassenbahn”

Liz, after her third time tripping into the rain gutter in the street (and the local tradition that if one trips into them accidentally, one must marry a local): “After I twisted my ankle in the first one, he’d better be worth it.”

Emily: “JD turned into a werewolf, that’s why he’s not here.”
Anzie: “I got to Bertoldsbrunnen at 6:05, but you all were gone.
I Tim: “Anzie, we’re German this week; we left at 6.”

I Tim: “All I have to say is: man, I feel like a woman.”

Shawn (when Shane started to jaywalk across the intersection in Frankfurt): “Shane! No green men: don’t go.”

Liz: “I’m not really dressed yet, it’s an optical illusion.”

Freiburg Table of Contents
Freiburg: Intro and the Team
Freiburg: 1st Friday - 1st Saturday
Freiburg: 1st Sunday - Monday
Freiburg: Tuesday
Freiburg: Wednesday
Freiburg: Thursday
Freiburg: 2nd Friday
Freiburg: 2nd Saturday
Freiburg: 2nd Sunday
Freiburg: The Quote Book

Bloomington

2006-05-11T21:07:00.000-04:00

Quick update for those of you wondering why I've disappeared the last couple of days. I'm currently on a RevTrak business trip with my Mom in Indiana. We got to Fort Wayne to set up our booth for the Indiana Association of School Business Officials conference yesterday afternoon, then I got to spend the evening hanging out with Dustin and his friend Bobby. We spent all this morning working the booth and then drove to Bloomington (boo IU!) for the night and a sales call tomorrow morning. We also got to meet up with Kathy for dinner as we were passing through Indy and had a good time. Anyway, before I get back to work uploading pictures for the Freiburg stuff, I'll give you a link to keep you entertained (came across this on jkOnTheRun).
A 6-minute documentary on the evolution of dance (props to anyone who actually remembers when most of these were in style)
Evolution of Dance
(as a side note, it was hilarious to show it to my Mom because she actually does remember a lot of the older ones).

One Down

2006-05-01T14:51:00.000-04:00

Had my hardest final this morning. It covered I've learned this year about the systems of the Boeing 727. That's a lot of material (the review guide I made that covered pretty much everything was 69 pages long, 12pt font, single spaced). Even Prof Young was impressed at the size and completeness of it (I've joked with Kevin and a couple others about selling it to next year's juniors). The bad news is I know that I got at least 5 questions wrong out of 82, and I needed to get 77.6 right to get an A in the class. IF I didn't get any more wrong than that (so I'm only a point or two away from an A), I might try talking Prof. Young into giving me the extra points based on the amount of effort that went into that 69 page study guide. Yeah, a long shot I know, but it might work.

The good news is that despite the fact that I only stopped studying to sleep for 3 hours last night, I was able to get in a hour long nap after the test before I came into work that felt like it was 2 or 3 hours itself. Yeah, that felt good.

I now only have to finish the take-home final for 329 and have a final on Wednesday afternoon (shouldn't be too bad) and then I'm done. Not leaving until Saturday, so I'll be able to relax and hang out with friends a little bit without the stress of studying.

The Lappy's still dying (something in the graphics subsystem is on the fritz, I'm getting corruption on boot even before it trys to load Windows). For a couple of days I was able to get it into XP once every 15 boots or so, but even then it wouldn't last very long before crashing into a BSOD again. I think Friday was the last time I was able to get it into Windows, so it is a progressive failure. I'm just hoping I can keep it running on Safe Mode (like it is now) until the end of the week when I get home and ship it off to Toshiba for warranty repair.

Now, back to other things (like catching up on the news in the world, continuing to make progress on the Freiburg stuff, working on the take-home final for 329, etc)...

BOOYAH!!!

2006-04-27T10:56:00.000-04:00

This week started out really bad on a couple of levels, but has just made something of a dramatic turnaround. I don't have time to elaborate (and doubt I will anytime in the forseeable future), so you'll just have to take my word for it: it's good. It's really good.

Formal Picture

2006-04-10T20:59:00.000-04:00

I'm back at the main compy now, so I decided to take a minute before I start being productive and give you guys a picture from Saturday. This is Eddie, Adam and I (all roommates next year) and the Windsor girls we brought as our dates (Amy, Ruth, Kathy, aka "ARK"). Photo credit goes to Chip:

Still Here

2006-04-10T18:37:00.000-04:00

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the Earth. Things are just really crazy right now and blogging has dropped to the bottom of an increasingly-long to-do list. I am making progress on the Freiburg posts (and I'm gonna release them all at once when they're ready).

The Cru Formal was a lot of fun Saturday night and the Danny Ocean look we worked so hard on actually came together pretty nicely. Sadly, most of my pictures didn't turn out very well, and the couple of good ones that Chip's given me so far are back in the Quad on the other compy, so I can't post any now (maybe I'll throw one or two up later tonight).

Don't Be So Impatient

2006-03-27T17:40:00.000-05:00

I know, I know; it’s been eight days since I returned from Freiburg and I still haven’t started blogging about it. Relax. This last week was miserably busy and what little free time I’ve had has been dedicated to exams, collecting pictures from the team so I can give them DVDs with all the pictures, preparing for our presentation on the trip at Cru on Friday, and other things (I didn’t even get to try to fight my jet lag or catch up on sleep until Saturday when I slept for 12 hours straight!).

The exams are over (one went very well, the other not so well) and I’m almost done collecting pictures for the DVDs, then I’ll finally be able to blog about the trip. What I’m going to do in the meantime is start making some outlines of what I want to cover and maybe even get some pictures online (Facebook for sure and maybe a Flickr album for the general public because I won’t have the patience to put many pictures on the blog here.

All told the team took over 2700 pictures during the trip, of which a little over 900 are mine. I’m in the process of stitching together the panoramas and deleting a lot of the duplicates (when you’re flat on your back on cobblestone pavement trying to take hand-held ¼ second exposure shots of a gothic cathedral, you’re going to take a lot in hopes that one or two turn out) for the final DVD and it looks like that’ll drop the number of shots I put on the disc down to about 550. It’s been really cool to look back through the pictures because they really bring a lot of the memories to life and we got some really good shots along the way.

One piece of good news before I go; my summer project packet finally came via email on Friday, so now I have a lot more information about what to expect. My other big project for this week (other than blogging the trip and much more important) is getting my support letter together and beginning to mail it out to pretty much everybody. If you want one and don’t think I have your address, please send me an email or give me a call.

Back

2006-03-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm back in the US. By the time I got back to my room and tried to do a little studying for my 7:30 exam this morning, I'd been up over 23 hours and my brain just wasn't functioning (although I have several excellent excuses for why I didn't sleep on the plane, ask me about the big one because I've got too much to do to blog about it for a while). But my friend Josh was kind enough to offer to meet me at 5am to study so that I could get a little (3.5 hours) of sleep and because I'd be more awake because my body's still on Freiburg time. That was a sucess and the exam seemed to go well (I won't find out for sure until next week), so now I've got a full day ahead of me before I can finally get some rest and try to deal with the jet lag + sleep deprivation from the trip.
Because it'll be a few days at best before I'm able to blog about it, I do want to throw out that Germany was AWESOME!!! God worked in amazing ways on bunch of different levels, so I'm absolutely psyched that God had me go on the trip. I'm working on sorting my multiple-hundreds of pictures together right now and sorting them (mainly turning the portrait ones upright), then I'll finally be able to look through them all for the first time.
Hopefully I'll be able to make some phone calls and tell people that I'm back sometime tonight, the only non-trip business calls I made yesterday were quick roaming calls to tell my parents I was back in the US and to see if there was any potential of seeing Tiller while I was in Atlanta (nope), so I've got a lot of calls to make soon.
Ok, that's all for now folks, BSY (and please pray for energy to get through another really long day on virtually no sleep).

Thursday

2006-03-16T09:01:00.000-05:00

Good news! I managed to find a specialty shop that had the chocolate I like so much; but I only bought 4 bars because it's kind of expensive.
Today is our last day in Freiburg, tomorrow we're going to head back to Frankfurt, stopping in Ludwicksburg (I think) to tour around for a whole as our "travel day." Then we'll spend Saturday in Frankfurt and head back home on Sunday. Our time in the Mensas (cafeterias) has generated some very interesting conversations and the gospel has been presented a number of times, but there haven't been any commitments for Christ. That is kind of what we expected because the ground is so spiritually hard and the culture is so rooted in postmodernism that it's easy to get into discussions with people, but people are more looking to just share ideas/opinions than to consider changing their own positions on things. One massive success over the last few days (which I'll have to detail once I get back) is Shane's ministry to high school (well, HS equivalent, they have a different school system here) students who were staying in the same youth hostel as us with a school group. He joined some of their guys in a game of table soccer (foosball in the US, but they us that name for real soccer here) and used it as a starting point to build friendships with a lot of them. He is very gifted in relational evangelism, so as he's built those friendships the last few evenings while they party, drink, and smoke in the hostel basement, he's been able to share the gospel several times with each of them. He says that several were really close to accepting Christ last night, but they weren't interested in doing anything major like that on the last night of their trip. So we can only pray that Gott (German for God) continues to pursue them and that they meet other believers soon.
I'm looking forward to blogging all about the trip and sharing a small (very small) fraction of the hundreds of pictures I've taken, but not until I get back because of how much time it'll take.
The ministry of Campus Für Christus (the local name for Campus Crusade for Christ, because the word "crusade" has very negative connotations here) has been gaining momentum and they've decided that this is the last year they're going to have a STINT team here from the States. They are in the process of putting together an ICS (International Campus Staff) team to put here long term starting this fall. That is a huge step forward because it shows the kind of progress they've made since they first started trying to build a ministry here. It's kind of dissapointing to Pauline though because she was pretty sure that she'd be coming here on STINT in the not too distant future, so now she has started praying about other locations to apply for.
This morning a few of the Purdue people were planning on getting up really early and heading over to the Münster (local gothic cathedral) around 6am to try to get in before there is anybody there to disturb and have a little praise and worship. We got the idea because a guy I had lunch with at the Mensa was telling me that he (cultural Christian, but not a believer) sometimes heads over there about the same time and there is no one around. So I got up at 5am and went down to the lobby at 5:20, but Anna was the only other one there. Chip decided he needed more sleep, as did several other people, and Fack (the worship leader) just overslept. So yeah, I'm kind of sad that those plans didn't work out because it would have been really awesome to sing modern praise and worship songs in a cathedral like that.
Ok, I'm gonna head over to the Campus Für Christus office to meet up with some people and head over to a local art museum (we already visited the medival torture museum this afternoon, which was, shall we say, unnerving). Expect to hear from me next after we get back to the US. BSY

Chocolate

2006-03-15T09:25:00.000-05:00

Rats! I can't find the brand of dark chocolate I like best anywhere around here (might be a French brand, which would explain the problem). So now I'm having to buy a few bars of different brands to figure out what I like best around here (hmm, taste testing different brands of dark chocolate, that's not so bad). Anyways, I'm afraid that's all the time I had for an update and what got written was the first thing that came to mind when I sat down. Things are going well, but I don't know if I'll be able to come here again during the trip (maybe once more).

In Germany

2006-03-13T08:49:00.000-05:00

Ok, it's our third day dirtside in Freiburg and I'm paying for a couple of minutes at an internet cafe. The keyboards are really funky here, so it's hard to type. The flights went well (although I didn't get much sleep). I had Schniztl (sp? You try spelling a German word on a compy without spellcheck where you can't even read the net because everything's in German and the keyboard's weird!) for dinner Saturday night and it was really good. We had our first day witnessing in the Mensas (university cafeterias) and it went ok; Shane and I conversed with a phd student and didn't get very far but learned a lot. It's a good thing I bought that external travel hard drive; I've taken over 200 pictures so far. Ok, time to get off, I don't know if I'll be able to post again or not.

Goodbye

2006-03-10T11:58:00.000-05:00

Ok, I just finished the last of my frantic packing and I'm about to shut down the compy, go to lunch, and then to the airport from there. Have a good spring break everybody!
Goodbye!
TLL BSY
Shawn M. Erdenberg

Freiburg Itinerary and the Johnny formerly known as "Pirate"

2006-03-09T22:20:00.000-05:00

I'm about to hit the sack a full hour and a half later than I planned for tonight, but I've been working on my packing list for tomorrow and catching up with Natalie because I haven't been able to talk with her for about a week. The game plan is to get up at 4am tomorrow and pack for Germany, have breakfast with a couple of guys, keep packing, lunch with anyone/everyone who's still around at noon, and then we leave for Indy at 1pm.

We'll catch a 4:30 flight (Delta 6263) to Cincinnati, then a 6:50pm flight from Cinci to Frankfurt (Delta 48), arriving at 9:30am local time. We'll catch a train to Freiburg from there. I'd post the general schedule for the trip, but I don't have a quick way to do that that would be legible on here, so you'll just have to read about it when I get back (or I might even get a chance to post once or twice while there, we should have the occasional chance to go online and check email. BTW, on that note, if you want to get a hold of me the best way would be my gmail (replace the " at " with @ in real life, I just put it that way so spammers couldn't have a web-crawler steal it for spamming purposes): FlyingShawn at Gmail.com ). For the trip back, most of the team will be taking Delta flights 107 and 4969 from Frankfurt to New York JFK to Indy, but three of us (myself included) have to take a different route. We'll be headed from Frankfurt to Atlanta and then up to Indy (Delta flights 15 and 760). The cool thing about that is I'll get my first ride on a Boeing 777 on the way to Atlanta (pretty much the coolest/nicest airliner in the sky). We'll get back late evening on Sunday the 19th and I have a 7:30am exam the next morning (yay!...not)

Ok, that's the general itinerary for our trip. One other quick thing before I go to bed; you remember me talking about our floor's resident pirate, Johnny Sieber, a while back? (if you don't remember, this guy: http://flyingshawn.blogspot.com/2006/01/pirates.html )
Well, a few days ago he shaved off the goatee he grew for Facial Hair February but kept the mustache and the soul patch. That look was just fine for him, a little be neater but still keeping the whole "pirate" thing going. So what did I find when I got back to Cary this evening but that he'd shaved those off too! He still has the long hair, but no facial hair to go with it. This is sad, now instead of looking like a pirate he just looks like a hippie:

Microsoft HQ

2006-03-08T20:12:00.000-05:00

(This is being cross-posted both as a comment in the M4 review and as a new blog post dated 3/8/2006):
So I was taking a look at my SiteMeter today and I noticed that I suddenly started getting a whole ton of traffic from Redmond, Washington using “Microsoft Corp” as their ISP. What’s confusing about it is that they all seem to be looking at Page 7 of the M4 review (the one on the Toshiba Power Saver, Centrino Hardware Control, and battery life), but I can’t seem to figure out why that specific page is so fascinating. Either you guys are all just goofing off on company time or this is actually related to something you’re working on (maybe trying to figure out how to get more battery life out of those new “Origami” Ultra Mobile PCs?) Regardless, I still love the M4 (wouldn’t be able to survive this semester without it); so I just wanted to give you guys a shout-out and thanks for putting the tablet OS together.

As a side note (hoping to capitalize on possibly having Microsoft’s ear for half a nanosecond):
I think it would definitely be to your advantage in creating buzz for this Origami/UMPC stuff if you were to give a few units to certain members of the Tablet community/blogosphere so we can post reviews of them (people like Rob Bushway, Eric Mack, Tracy Hooten, myself [hint, hint ;) ], etc). It would be especially effective if the machines were to keep instead of being lent out for a few days or a week so we could review them as “lifestyle” machines as I gather they’re supposed to be. I know that I personally have gotten a lot of emails from people who bought the M4 because of my review and that some of the others (like Eric Mack) have had the same experience. So I think it reasonable to think that some solid reviews like that would have a similar effect on UMPC sales. I can’t speak for others in the community (although I’d guess they feel the same way), but I personally would be very willing to do another massive, good-and-bad (aka: fair), in-depth review like this in exchange for one of those devices [another shameless hint ;) ].

As a second and even more shameless side note:
I’m a Professional Flight major at Purdue graduating in a little over a year. Any chance you guys would be interested in an intern or first officer for your corporate flight department around that time?

Future RevTrak office, anyone?

2006-03-08T10:45:00.000-05:00

TIME Magazine photoessay on the Googleplex (Google HQ):
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/inside_google/
(This is intended as a not-so-subtle hint for one David C. Thorson)

Is it early or late morning? I can't tell anymore

2006-03-08T09:10:00.000-05:00

Is it really only 9am? I'm sitting here in my 7:30 class and it feels more like 10:30 or 11:00. I guess that means this pre-conditioning I'm doing is working. The good news is that I was able to get to bed at a reasonable hour last night (10), so I got about 7 hours of sleep before I got up at 5. Let me tell you, it's boring to be up that early! You can't turn on the lights, you aren't conscious enough to read or study effectively, and no one else is up to hang around with. The good news is tomorrow will be better in that regard. I'm still getting up at 5 (and don't have class till 10:30), but I'm gonna meet Fack around 6 to watch Monty Python together and then I'm meeting Amy for breakfast at 8. If you're crazy enough to be up that early, you're certainly welcome to join us for the movie or come to breakfast just let me know and I'll give you the details.

In other news, I signed up for 16 credit hours next fall. The game plan is to get my hardest classes out of the way so I can have an easy and light final semester next spring (I'll only have 11 credits left, so I'll need a fluff class to stay full time as a student) .

Slacker Classes

2006-03-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

Good news, the passport came, along with my new pilot’s license, a very blue hawaiian shirt, and some dark chocolate.

At 4pm today I get to register for classes next fall. Has anyone here taken any finance or accounting courses? It was recommended to me by a guy in industry (VP of Governmental Affairs and Corporate Communications at Republic Airways) that it would really help my resume to take one or two courses in finance or accounting because it looks really good to companies like his. So I’m thinking about taking that advice, but I need to find an easy one so it doesn’t add too much to my course load. Any advice you can give would be much appreciated (even if it’s not by 4pm today). Also, I’m thinking about trying to take another fun class like Music Appreciation or Bowling if my schedule allows it, but I don’t really have any ideas at this point. Any thoughts on courses you’ve taken or even just heard of that are fun, interesting, and pretty easy?

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the comic strip Get Fuzzy, but it’s one of my all-time favorites (tied with FoxTrot and topped only by Calvin and Hobbes) and runs in the Chicago Trib. I was doing some back-reading of it online the other day and thought this one was hilarious (you'll probably have to click the link to see a big enough version to read):
http://www.comics.com/comics/getfuzzy/archive/getfuzzy-20060205.html

Missing Passport

2006-03-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I know this is the second post in one night, but I need some prayer about something. Last Monday, my mom sent me a package including my passport and some other stuff I'm going to need for Germany in a few days. It still hasn't arrived. It's only supposed to take two or three days to mail something from Chicago to here, so we're getting kind of worried. Please pray that it shows up ASAP so I can leave the country on Friday

Creative Date #4

2006-03-06T18:51:00.000-05:00

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

busy busy

2006-03-02T14:02:00.000-05:00

So yeah, I'm about halfway through my big paper for tomorrow (describing the special design features of SpaceShipOne, which, as you can see from the pictures, is a very unique craft). I hald have two big homework assignments due and a good sized quize tomorrow. Today I'll be busy with the 727 Sim and running sound for worship rehersal at church tonight. So yeah, it's gonna be a really busy couple of days...

Some more pictures:

"Captive Carry" to 50,000ft by the White Knight mothership:
Cockpit view:
In Space:

It's Gone

2006-03-01T01:13:00.000-05:00

It's so weird to reach up and scratch my beard while I'm thinking and find nothing there to scratch! This is going to drive me crazy for a while.

Here's the before/after of when I shaved at 12:01am March 1st:

15,138+

2006-02-27T18:27:00.000-05:00

The title: I've now officially crossed the 15,000 visitor mark on my blog. wow

The high dive certification on Thursday went well. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s where we get to go up in the 727-200 simulator (the nicer one the seniors usually fly) and they simulate an explosive decompression at 35,000ft. The air is so thin up there that you have about 10 seconds of useful consciousness before you become hypoxic and black out. During that 10 seconds, your cheeks flutter as your breath explodes out of you, your eardrums burst, your eyeballs bulge out, and all sorts of other unpleasant things as your body fights to hold itself together while equalizing pressure with the outside world. I’m told that it is an incredible amount of pain, but they didn’t actually depressurize us. During that painful 10 seconds you have, you have to reach behind you and grab the oxygen mask, slam it on your face and turn it on (and they did put us on real tanked oxygen so we could see what it was like). Then you check in with the other two crewmembers to make sure they’re ok and start an emergency dive down to 10,000ft, where the air is breathable. You dive at the “barber pole” speed, which is a moving bar on the airspeed indicator that tells you the speed not to exceed or risk structural damage to the aircraft (it moves because it’s dependant on the speed of sound, which varies with altitude). Pretty exciting. It was also cool because of how much better the -200 sim is (it even simulates the motion of the plane settling when you bring it to a stop on the ground like your car settles back when you stop at a light). Little touchy on the ground steering though, tended to throw us around a little bit if we didn’t use the tiller (kind of like a quarter of a steering wheel used for taxi) just right.

As of right now, there are only 29.5 hours left in our annual celebration of Facial Hair February. Sadly, this is likely the last time I’ll be able to participate because I’m hoping to have job interviews next year. Ordinarily, that’s not such a big deal (yes, guys have gotten jobs without having to shave mid-month for their interviews), but the airlines want interviewees to be in a position that they could start work right then if hired, and any facial hair apart from a mustache is banned because it would interfere with the seal of the oxygen mask I mentioned above. As I was thinking about what I’m going to do in the hair department at the end of the month, I briefly considered opening it up to a public vote via comments on here, but then I realized that it wouldn’t work because the only votes would be for mutton chops by Amy Schott (which I am not considering because: a. I can’t stand them, and b. I couldn’t really pull them off anyway) and for a mullet by Edgar (which is totally out of the question, but my willingness to make a deal that if “he grows a mullet, I’ll shave my head” still stands). As always, you’re free to offer opinions because I’m certainly not going to discourage comments, but no mob rule today. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see me this month, here’s a picture taken a couple hours ago:

In other news, the test I had on Friday in my 727 Systems class went better than I thought. It was one of those things where I was up until 3am studying the night before, didn’t feel very prepared, and didn’t have a great feeling about it when I walked out, but then I was pleasantly surprised. The test that I was up late studying for last night got moved to Wednesday, so I have an extra couple of days to improve my study sheet and get to know the material better. I also have a paper to write for that class this week, which makes me sad because I’ve managed to do so well in the paper department over the last three years at Purdue. As much as some of you will hate me for it, the paper I wrote last week and this one this week are the first two papers I’ve had to do here. Yeah, community college rocks…

In AT320 last week (my High Performance Aircraft class), the professor wanted us to understand what went into the making of things out of composites (the new big thing in aviation materials because they’re incredibly lightweight and are as strong as steel), so he took us over to Purdue’s Advanced Composites Laboratory to make our very own composite rulers. Yep, that’s right folks; I now have a carbon fiber composite ruler. A few of us are guessing they cost about $50 each in materials. We took sheets of graphic fiber cloth and cut them into 10x3 segments at various angles and sandwiched them together, then we baked them in a vacuum at 600 degrees for 24 hours and trimmed them down to size. Mine isn’t perfectly straight because of the way we trimmed it, but it’s close enough and pretty cool. To give you an idea of how tough this stuff is (keep in mind that our rulers were made from 6-layers of the cloth), if you make a composite of 16 layers, you have the leading edge of the Space Shuttle’s wings. Yeah, this same stuff, not even 3 times as thick, is enough to protect the Shuttle on reentry. So I could probably toss my ruler from space and it’d survive the trip down. However, if they don’t cure quiet perfectly in the oven, you’re in trouble. Take for example the composite diving board Professor Kroes made for his pool when they first built the lab at Purdue; shortly after they installed it, Prof. Nolan was over taking a swim and goes to jump off the board, jumps once, twice, and……CRAACKKK…..the board snaps in half. Poor Nolan…

Before I do some actual research for my paper, I’ll be nice and give you guys a couple of links (which is, as we all know, the real reason you’re here):

First, the Microsoft Origami project. What it is, we don’t really know for sure. Early hints indicate that it’s a tiny TabletPC with integrated GPS, Bluetooth, EVDO (wireless internet over the cell networks), all-day (think 8 hours or so) battery life, and potentially a sub-$800 price point. Here’s a teaser trailer that’s leaked out onto the web a few days before they officially announce what it is (Microsoft is now claiming the video is a couple of years old and they’ll only be showing an example of the technology, but I’m hoping there will be an actual device like this in the next few months) (if the video is jerky, pause it for a few seconds to let it buffer):
http://creativecoremedia.com/mso.swf

Because today’s third link is a reinterpretation of the original Trogdor video from Homestarrunner, I thought I might refresh your memory on the original first:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail58.swf

Now, the new Trogdor video someone made (I don’t know who made it, but they used clips from the movie Dragonheart set to the music)(my Windows Media Player gave an error when I tried to play it, but it still worked when I hit Ok):
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~serdenbe/Trogdor.avi

High Dive

2006-02-23T09:53:00.000-05:00

I have my High Dive Certification test this afternoon. Should be kinda fun because we're in the -200 sim (much nicer than the -100), but it's also going to be really hard. Please pray for me.

Heard from Purv...

2006-02-22T00:11:00.000-05:00

An AIM transcript:

Adam Purvis: Lets just say......
Me: yeah?
Adam Purvis: .....
Me: come on man
Adam Purvis: You'll probably get a tan for a few weeks over the summer

Waiting

2006-02-21T23:27:00.000-05:00

I talked with Adam Purvis on the phone a few hours ago. He applied to the same Summer Project as I did (Desert Rivers) and got the call that he was accepted this afternoon. Apparently the guy he talked to asked if my voicemail message was kind of weird (which it is), saying that he'd called me and left a message. The problem is that my cell phone insists that I have not missed any calls and when I call my voicemail it says I have no messages (I'm getting increasingly dissatisfied with Cingular, because this has happened a handful of times over the last few years and it usually takes a couple of days to get the original message, if ever). So after a few hours of waiting for the message to come in, I called Purv and had him give me the guy's number so I could just call him and explained I never got his message. Just my luck; I got his voicemail. So I left a message explaining the situation and hopefully he'll be calling me back soon. Adam sounded like he was excited but trying to hide it for when he calls, so I think this is good news. In any case, Purv said that if I hadn't heard back by midnight (half hour away), which is still a reasonable time of night where this guy is located (California), then he'll tell me himself if I got accepted or not.
In any case, please remember to keep praying that they change the length of the project back to the original 6 weeks to make our time there really worth the airfare to get to the Middle East.

Bird Strike! and "Pride and Prejudice"

2006-02-20T18:48:00.000-05:00

’91 Honda Rustbucket – 1
Adult Red-Tailed Hawk – 0

After I finished with my second church of the morning (which went very well, stayed awake and all sermons were good, although the Kossuth Street pastor was out of town for a family emergency. See last post if you have no idea what I’m talking about), I went to lunch at Earhart (made to order chocolate-chip pancakes!) and gave Blue (Rebecca) a ride back to McCutcheon. On the way there, we were going about 35mph on State Street and all of a sudden BAM!, something HIT MY CAR. Even scarier; it hit the upper left corner of my windshield, so there was no way to see it coming through the roof of the car and was right in front of me. In a flash of brown it was gone and we were confused out of our minds. Blue was looking out the window as I parked in front of McCutcheon and determined that it must have been a bird that hit us. When we walked back to the site, we found a Papa Johns delivery guy on the phone with the DNR and standing over a Red-Tailed Hawk on the side of the road. As soon as he told them where to find it, he left to go deliver his pizzas while we stood there and looked at it. The good news is that it ended up right next to the curb, so there wasn’t much danger of more cars hitting it as they drove by (and of course we weren’t going to move it even if it was in the middle of the road, because you just don’t touch birds, especially birds of prey). It was obviously quite hurt, although there weren’t any gaping wounds visible or a lot of blood (just a few drops out of the beak). By the time the DNR guy showed up about a half hour later, the bird had breathed its last. He put on some special gloves, and after checking to make sure it was dead he picked it up and gave it a little examination. He said that neither of its wings were broken, and there were no apparent wounds (like I mentioned before), so we’re guessing it broke its neck on impact with my car. It was an absolutely beautiful adult specimen and he thought they might stuff it for display at a state park or something (makes me sad that it’s illegal to own feathers or other parts of raptors unless they are for a religious purpose, because I would have loved to have one of those feathers). Why it hit my car, I don’t know; maybe it was sick or messed up in the head or didn’t notice us coming as it dove for some prey. For all I know we might have just saved the life of one of our precious Purdue squirrels…

My busy evening went well, although I’m going to miss being able to stay for more than the first half hour of action group because I have to leave early for my Freiburg meeting at 8pm. Judging from the way we interacted as a team last night, I get the feeling that spending spring break overseas with that group should be, shall we say, interesting (and I mean that in a good/hilarious way). We still haven’t had much chance to get to know people, but I can tell people are picking up on the usual Chip-Fack-Pauline-Me banter really fast.

On the way back from Prayer & Praise I was able to share less-than-popular opinion with the ARK (Amy-Ruth-Kathy) girls on our entertainment Friday night. As a bit of background, for a period of several months they’ve been twisting the arms of Eddie, JChen, and I into seeing Pride and Prejudice with them and it was showing Friday night at Fowler. So after Cru a large group of us found ourselves scattered around the theater attempting to follow fast-paced Old English dialogue. After the movie got done Amy spent the ride from Fowler over to Harrison Grille attempting to pry my opinion of the movie out of me, but I would only say that I wanted to think about it before I said anything. It would be safe to say that my thoughts, when I finally shared them Sunday night, didn’t go over very well. In brief summary (and I suspect largely due to the attempt to translate such a large novel/6-hr BBC series into a 2-hr film, but it’s entirely possible the novel also suffers from the same problems, I can only speak for the movie because it’s all I’ve seen/read and should be evaluated as such):

Because of the large amounts of events/details/subplots going on in the highly complex storyline and the lack of clear connections between all of them, the plot as a whole seemed convoluted or, at times, downright schizophrenic.
Apparently the movie is supposed to span a series of several months (or longer), but there is no clear sense of the passage of time. Apart from a very rare mention in the dialogue that someone’s been somewhere for a month or similar time marker, there’s no way to tell if a scene is separated from the next by a matter of hours, days, weeks, or longer.
The love story itself, which is apparently the main focus of all this chaos, feels about as believable as that of Anakin and Padme/Amidala in Episode II (Star Wars). For those of you unversed with that movie, it is notorious for going from him as brooding, moody teenager obsessed with her and her barely tolerating him to them both wildly in love (and he’s still a brooding, moody teenager) without any visible movement from one to the other (the only scenes that make the love subplot even remotely believable can only be found in the “Deleted Scenes” section of the DVD, but I digress). Pride and Prejudice felt largely the same way.

On a more technical note, the mixing of the music/dialogue was often done in such a way as to have the music partially drowning out the dialogue so that it was even more difficult to follow than it would otherwise have been (I can understand spoken Old English just fine, if I can hear it (actually, it's not technically "Old" English, but a relatively early form of Modern English)).

The responses the girls offered to my reasons for saying I didn’t care for it essentially boiled down to “well, you should watch the 6-hr BBC version/read the book.” But, as Tiller so aptly pointed out the other night, I wasn’t asked to evaluate the BBC version or the book, I was asked my opinion of the movie. If to understand or appreciate a film, one must consult a rendering 3x as long or a novel that would take even longer to read, one can conclude that the film cannot stand on its own and is therefore only “poor” at best. Granted, the other sources can be used to enhance one’s understanding/appreciation (as it did for the ARK girls to the point that they were able to fill in all the discrepancies mentioned earlier without even thinking about it), but a movie simply must be able to stand on its own merit.

As a humorous side note before I leave the topic, when I mentioned to my Mom on Saturday that they’d twisted our arms into going, she said she wished she’d known in advance so she could strongly admonish us not to go because it’s “too much of a chick flick.” Even funnier, when I mentioned that comment to the ARK girls, they immediately attempted to argue that because it comes from a piece of “great” literature, it doesn’t count as a chick flick! (an argument that flies in the face of the definitions of “chick flick” provided by Wikipedia (where it is even listed as a specific example of the genre), Encarta, the Cambridge Dictionary Online, and is regarded as such by my Mom, Tiller, Natalie Samples, both of my roommates, Amy Chen, Rebecca, and others).

And now for a shout-out to Rebecca and Amy Chen, who just paid me a completely random visit here at the AvTech Library (I’m at work) while I was typing this. Just one more thing to add onto an already good day (you know, when your first two classes of the day are cancelled so you don’t actually have anything until 1:30, it makes for a very relaxing start to the day).

In other news, a friend of mine has the first season of Hogan’s Heroes, a classic TV show from the same era as Gilligan’s Island on DVD and I’ve been working my way through it. I used to watch it when I was little and they had it on daytime TV, but I hadn’t seen it in years and had forgotten just how funny it was. Yeah, let me know if you want to join me for an episode or two sometime.

Ok, time to get some actual work done around the library and then meet Chris Rausch for dinner…

How’s this for a weekend?

2006-02-18T23:24:00.000-05:00

Chip has a Turkish friend through the grad school that he’s been getting to know and hoping to share the gospel with (although he hasn’t yet), and the guy just up and asked Chip the other day if he goes to church and if he’d be willing to take him with sometime. Chip said yes (rather enthusiastically, I might add). So because this guy had never seen how Christian brothers interact, Chip got Shane, Fack, Bliggy, and I to come with them to Calvary Baptist’s Saturday service with plans to go out to dinner at a Turkish restaurant afterwards. Well, the dinner thing fell through, but the guy did say that the sermon answered a lot of questions he’s been asking the last few days and wants to come back (yay!!!).

When the rest of us met up for dinner later, Chip told me that the pastor at Kossuth Street Baptist is starting a sermon series on Luke tomorrow that’s supposed to be really insanely good. Even though I won’t be able to attend in future weeks (because of sound commitments at ECC), he’s managed to convince me to go to the 8am service with him to see what it’s like (and if I like it I can get MP3s of the rest of the series off their website). Then Chip and I will split up and he’ll go back to Calvary for the rest of the morning and I’ll go to ECC for Sunday School and the later service there.

Yeah, three different church services within a 24 hour span! Not to mention Sunday School, Action Group (a meeting of Cru cell group leaders in the Quad), a Freiburg team meeting, and Prayer & Praise later in the day. Pretty crazy, huh?

As for Perelandra, over the last couple of days I’ve been able to talk about the pros and cons of the Saron-vs.-upgrade question (see last post) with Tiller, Chip, and Fack and they’ve all expressed agreement with my thoughts and the Station Manager’s official decision. As excited as we all are about the sensitivity the CSS-TRIO array has shown so far, we’re going to go ahead with those upgrades instead of starting further research on the Saron band. Like I mentioned before, the earliest we expect to be up and running again is shortly after spring break, but it could take longer depending on how things come together. We’re hoping to pick up right where we left off on Saron, but there’s too much work to get done between now and then to make any reliable predictions.

Ok, now to bed so I don’t fall asleep in church tomorrow…

The Hundred

2006-02-16T19:38:00.000-05:00

It’s now been a week since that fateful phone call from Chip I last blogged about. While the decision was made last Friday morning, I haven’t actually gotten around to mentioning it on here yet: I’m going. After all that time thinking and praying about it and talking with other people, it became pretty clear to me that this is what God wants me to do with my spring break. So thank you for all of your prayers, thoughts, and thought-provoking questions that helped me have assurance about this.

In other news, today has been substantially better than most of the rest of this week for me. For various reasons I won’t go into, I have been emotionally drained down to about zero in the course of the last week. Several of you probably noticed my “blah” state the last few days because of it; I just didn’t have the emotional energy to express my interest in other people’s lives, support them, or have an attitude of joy in my own life. I was able to spend some time talking with Chip last night about everything, and after a little venting about what was going on, confessing some attitudes aggravating the situation, and praying together about it, things started to get better. I felt more rested than usual this morning and after some praying and worshiping as I showered and got dressed, I was able to spend some time with Him over breakfast and the effect has been powerful. God really revitalized me this morning and man, that makes a huge difference on your day.

On Tuesday I hosted the Third Annual Singles Awareness Day Party down in Meredith and it was a huge success. As a point of background, a couple of years ago I realized that there were way too many Cru people sitting alone in their rooms on “V-Day,” so I decided to put something together so single people had something to do. In the past we’ve had a good time doing things like watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 and playing GoldenEye/Halo, but attendance was pretty low. This year attendance went up 575% to a peak of 23 and we had a great time watching a movie and playing games afterwards. BTW, the movie of the night was a Robert Redford flick from ’92 called Sneakers and it was pretty funny, so I’d recommend it if you want something to watch (Sarah was kind enough to suggest it and then bring the tape back from home so we could borrow it instead of having to rent something). One sad note was that I had to explain to Dustin (with great remorse) that he wasn’t welcome at the party this year, even though he’s been a staple at the S.A.D. Party in the past. Then again, the reason he wasn’t welcome is that he is now in a relationship (the only requirement to get in is that you have to be single), so I don’t really feel sorry at all about turning him away because he’s got a really awesome girlfriend. In any case, the party was a big success and I think people enjoyed having things to do. Three notable absences that night were the ARK girls (Amy/Ruth/Kathy), but you’ll have to hit the link over to Amy’s blog to find out why (see the links section to the right of your screen).

Seeing as how it’s been forever since I gave you a Perelandra update (I think the last one was in October), I might as well bring you up to speed. Last I mentioned it, we were in the midst of competing with another station about trying to establish contact on the “Betry” channel. Not very long after that update, our Station Manager decided the lack of any promising results weren’t worth spending any more of our resources on, so the plug was pulled on that project (incidentally, the other station managed to get a pretty reliable signal and has been communicating at about 36kpbs since sometime toward the end of Christmas break, so congrats to them). At the start of the year we shut down the station completely for about 3 weeks to upgrade some components and have been operating at a reduced capacity since then. Even though we have some more upgrades to do (and might have to go through another complete shutdown for an even longer time to install them sometime in the near future) and the ones we just installed aren’t perfectly tuned yet, we’ve still managed to detect a previously unknown channel using the new CSS-TRIO array. Preliminary analysis seems to be indicating that this new “Saron” channel is giving us better signal quality than Betry (we’re even getting an occasional “ping” reply!), but doesn’t necessarily have the same potential for a wide-bandwidth connection farther down the road. Right now the Station Manager is going over our data and the reports on our findings so far and is deciding if we should go after this one or wait to decide until after those upgrades I was mentioning earlier. If we go for the upgrades, we’ll probably be shutting down until after spring break at the earliest while we install some components and wait for others to arrive. The good side of that is that they would be some pretty significant upgrades, but the bad side is that we can’t realistically shorten the amount of time they would take to do. So basically we’re just waiting for a decision to be made before we start sending out stronger signals or shutting things down.

Some of you actually still reading at this point might be wondering why this post is entitled “The Hundred.” Quite simply, this is my 100th blog since I made my first post back on the 5th December, 2004 (where I explained that I’d only signed up for blogger so I could comment on friends’ blogs, I didn’t start actually blogging until February 26th of last year). A hundred posts in a year, that’s averaging slightly better than a post every 4 days! (and this, from the guy who hates to write)

Anyway, I should get this posted so I can head back to the Quad and watch Smallville with Purv, GE, and King Richie (as is our weekly tradition). Ok, fine, I’ll give you two links to go along with this 100th of posts:
What could I possibly link to that’d be appropriate for today? Hmmm…what better than the 100th Strong Bad Email? (coming to you in exclusive "Huge Screen" SWF mode)
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemailahundred.swf
And, just for kicks, one of the funniest Strong Bad emails ever: VIRUS!!
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail118.swf

Need Some Prayer

2006-02-10T00:59:00.000-05:00

Ok, something HUGE has happened that I need some prayer about. I'm completely reeling from shock over what's happened. I know some of you will give me trouble for updating the blog when I haven't even started the homework I have due in my 10:30am class (it's currently about 1am), but if it makes you feel any better I copied the explanation of all of this out of an email I wrote earlier this evening to some friends. Anyways, PLEASE be praying for me and I'll be sure to let you know once things are decided. So here's what's going on:

As you may or may not know, my plan for this spring break was (up until a few hours ago) to go home, work, and relax a little bit. I had about a 95% certainty that would be the case, with maybe a 4% chance of God providing out of nowhere for Big Break like he did last year, and a less than 1% chance of what's just happened tonight.

When Chip told me at Christmas Conference that the Claytons had asked him and Shane to be in charge of the Freiburg trip, I had a gut reaction (totally not a God thing, just a feeling in the back of my mind) of "oh crap, somehow I'm going to end up in Germany." Again, that was just a gut reaction. What it did was prompt me to pray about it a little because I hadn't already and as a result I came up with some pretty firm thoughts that I said to God, my family, and any friends I talked with about it. Basically, I've committed to dedicating all my resources to Summer Project (especially fundraising), so if God were to suddenly drop an envelope full of money in my mailbox, I'd use it for project. If God were to drop an envelope with $1400 in German currency, I'd take the hint and consider going to Germany over spring break. The idea was that He'd have to provide in a way that I clearly couldn't also use for project before I'd even consider doing anything for spring break.

Well, I don't have any German currency in my hands; but metaphorically that's exactly what's happened. This evening I got a call from Chip explaining that through a diverse set of circumstances, God has provided all the funding needed for me to join the Freiburg trip. Are you shocked yet? I know that at that point I was absolutely reeling (I still am).

So he explained it all to me and I gave my parents a call. Once they were assured that it was all on the up-and-up and the money was actually there, they said they had no reason for me not to go (something of a surprise in and of itself, I was expecting them to have more reservations). So I talked with Chip some more about the exact details and now I need to give him a "pretty sure" answer by mid-afternoon Friday and a definite answer by Monday morning.

Keep in mind that I'm not necessarily even all that interested in going to Germany over break (skipping classes and major jet lag being among the reasons not to go), so this is completely out of nowhere. My go/no-go personal opinions are all about 50/50 right now, but I certainly can't ignore this not-so-subtle hint of God providing the money. I don't want to make this kind of decision without a lot of prayer. So basically I need you to pray that God would make it clear to me through prayer if I should go to Germany or not and that He would do it by the deadline tomorrow. As a side note, this "hint" is strong enough that I'm running on the game plan that unless He says otherwise, I'll be going to Germany; but I still want to be really sure through prayer about all of it.

Thanks again for your prayers in all of this. Now, onto my AT 322 pressurization homework…

BYOM

2006-02-06T19:03:00.000-05:00

While the Cru women were gone on Women's Retreat, the guys got together at ECC and celebrated the second annual BYOM (Bring Your Own Meat). Some highlights:
My U.S.D.A Choice grade, 1.25lb T-Bone steak:
Shortly thereafter:
A tray of meat headed for the grill:
Edgar taking a shot at Carpetball:
If you look carefully, you can see the blurred bball that was just thrown:
Garet on his way to a swirly:
Yes, they actually gave him one:
Joe closing his eyes while throwing in dodgeball:
Bliggy just after the throw:
Edgar, Dustin, and I:
And a bonus picture from when we watched a movie in Windsor the night before, Courtney, Dustin, and I:

Ok, as a double bonus I'm even going to give you links to my two favorite commercials from teh Superbowl last night.
First, my top favorite commercial (too bad it's for beer): "Magic Fridge" -Bud Light
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8248766101102341416
Second, "Stick" -FedEx
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8181801990250175607

Creative Dates #2 and #3

2006-02-02T08:50:00.000-05:00

We must be nuts.
In the course of one week, my cell group managed to have three creative dates. The first one, which I've already told you about, was with the Windsor Monday cell group, the second was with the Windsor Wednesday group on Wednesday evening, and the third we had with Shreve on Saturday.

We planned to have our creative date with Windsor on the same night and time as their usual cell group so that as many girls as possible would be able to come. Because most of our guys were either on their way to Cary from other things or helping prepare the food, I went to walk the girls over from Windsor by myself. While we were waiting for the last few girls to show up, the girls asked about our plans for the evening and some expressed concern that Matt Chupp was the master chef in charge of dinner. I promised them that he would do a good job and not mess up spaghetti and, thankfully, I was right (I never doubted his cooking skills, but it would have looked bad if something had gone wrong after I promised it'd be good). I wasn't able to walk the girls all the way to the Music Room in Cary East where we were eating because Chris had a really bad headache and we had to stop by my room for some Advil, but I was able to call ahead and have Sean Valencourt come to the loading dock to walk them the rest of the way.

After a nice spaghetti dinner with garlic bread, I brought out my special surprise dessert that I'd been hinting at all evening. Clad in aluminum foil to keep its nature secret, I regaled the group with the tale of how their dessert had been personally brought to the United States by my parents on an 8-hour flight from Europe. Then I proceeded to unwrap the foil and show to the room the two bars of 70% Cacao European dark chocolate I was holding. After giving instructions to those who didn't know the proper way to each dark chocolate (and yes, there actually is a right way) for maximum enjoyment, I proceeded to pass them around so each person could take a couple of squares. For most, the chocolate was a big hit, and for a couple of others the part of the right technique of having it in small amounts was completely lost:
What you see here is Keri Bias with a whole square in her mouth:

Here is a similar picture of Justin:
Sean about to join them (I doubt there was any coincidence that all three people who committed this grievous crime were all sitting together): After dessert I stayed back with Sean and Matt Chupp to finish the cleanup while everyone else headed over to the CoRec to play some Wallyball. Sadly, a couple of the guys and about half the girls had other commitments that evening, so only a small group was able to come play with us. We played three or four games and had a lot of fun with the group that was able to come. Here are the faithful eight who stayed until the end of the date:

Jumping ahead a few days (past the weirdness of my Friday night plans and duct-taping Mike), we had our creative date with the Shreve cell group. Unlike Windsor and Cary, which have cell groups on multiple nights of the week, Shreve people all meet together on one night and then split up into smaller groups for actual Bible study time. That meant that we were going to have a big date, possibly 15-20 girls alone, much less the guys of my group. Because some of our guys weren't able to come (slackers), we recruited a couple of random Cary guys from other cell groups like Jonny Sieber (the pirate), John Cobb (my roommate), Mike, Cromer, and one or two others to join us so we wouldn't be quite so terribly outnumbered. As it turned out, there were 17 girls and 13 guys in attendance.

Because we didn't even want to think about the logistics of cooking for a group that size, we decided to have an event we had brainstormed on at Christmas Conference called Dress-Up Dining Hall. Everyone dressed up for the evening with the guys all wearing nice shirts and ties (we said no sport coats, but Jonny and Mike wore them anyway). After a tie-tying frenzy in the last few minutes before we left the Quad for the guys who either hadn't had time or didn't know how to tie a tie (guilty on both counts), we headed for Shreve. I have a strong feeling that anybody seeing us around that evening thought we were all Greeks, because you really never see groups of guys roaming around all dressed up unless they're doing something with their frat.
We met the girls in the Shreve lobby, and after basic introductions we walked over to Earhart Dining Court where a couple of our guys had gone ahead to prepare one of the back rooms for our private use. Some pictures of the group:
Table 1: Table 2:
After dinner, we went back over to Shreve to play games in the vending lobby behind the main office. Everyone split into smaller groups for games like Uno and Catchphrase, and then after a while we consolidated into one big group for a game of French Charades. For the sake of time, I won't try to explain the game here, but you can think of it as a cross behind Charades and Telephone (the game kids play where a message is whispered in people's ears as it's passed around a room and usually ends up wildly distorted by the time it reaches the last person). Only a couple people in the room had every played it before, but they all caught on really quickly and it was a riot. After we finished the game we declared the evening a success and headed back to Cary. A couple of shots:
A group picture before the games started:
The silly shot:
Jenga! Waiting for our turn in the hotseat during French Charades:
All eyes on me as I walk in the room (Kelly, center, is about to act out the three skits):
Kenny acting:
Matt acting:
Carrie acting:

In other news, yesterday was the official start of the annual tradition of Facial Hair February (aka "FebruHairy"). As some of you may remember from last year, FebruHairy dates back many, many years for Cru guys in the Quad and in the recent past has spread around to include guys all over Cru. The official rules (unchanged for at least the last two years, possibly longer) state that: "Don't shave your face for the entire month of February. Exceptions are same as in the past: 1) If your neck hair connects with your chest hair, by all means shave the point of connection, 2) If the upper cheek region is chaotic, you can shave it." Because I hopefully won't be able to participate next year ("hopefully" because I'm hoping to have job interviews), I'm definitely doing it this year. There is now a Facebook group with nearly 50 members for the guys participating and Amy Schott just started the "Women In Support of Facial Hair February" group for girls to join. Expect pictures at the end of the month.

Today's links brought to you by Google Video (and Josh Weis, who pointed these particular clips out to me):

Ghostly car commercial (watch as the car goes behind a tree and disappears). According to the description, the best part is that you can even hear the cameraman whispering in the background about it near the end of the clip (you have to really turn up the volume for it):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3385579284690408654

The second link is a guy complaining about Mac computers. As you all know, I'm no fan of Macs, I consider them counter-intuitive and vastly overpriced. This clip rings very true in my experience with, as I call it, "Macintrash." LANGUAGE WARNING: There are a few profanities in the middle of his rant, so don't watch it if that's enough to spoil your enjoyment of the whole thing:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6553260189868317794

This video is just plain funny to all technophiles. Mocks the iPod fad with something called the iPod Flea:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6979065094299371478

Ok, one more before I resume studying for my test today (for the record, I wrote this post yesterday, but didn't get a chance to upload the last few pictures and post till this morning). This one is quite possibly most hilarious to college-age guys, but some friends and I all consider it a riot. So, here you have it: "Somethings that women can't do in public."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=601898222402457606

Picking Up Where I Left Off...

2006-01-30T18:49:00.000-05:00

Seeing as how I left a few topics untouched last time, I'll start with those. (Most of you are already up to date on most of these from conversing with me, but there are a few who aren't)

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a summer project, it's a 6-10 week trip somewhere in the world (either in the US or elsewhere) for college students to spend their summer in ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ. For a couple of years, I've wanted to go on a project, but never had the opportunity because I had to work to pay for school during the summer and other things like my CFI training got in the way. This year I decided that I'd finally go for it.

When I first started seriously thinking about it, I knew that I wanted to do an international project rather than a domestic one, but I didn't have any idea where I wanted to go. Over the last couple of months I've been spending time talking with my friends Adam and Chip about where each of them went and found both trips were very attractive to me. It was a very difficult choice to make because both projects appealed to me a lot and God didn't seem to be strongly calling me to one over the other. The decision eventually came down to a bunch of small factors adding up to me being about 80% confident that I wanted to put Desert Rivers (Adam's project) as my first choice and Acts 29 (Chip's) as my second. Both are to the Middle East, but I'm afraid I can't say any more specifically than that.

Filling out the application was a very long process and they ask a lot of in-depth questions, but over the course of about a week I was able to get everything answered. Chip was willing to be my peer reference, but I was having trouble finding someone on staff to be my staff reference because I have very little interaction with Cru staff due to the way that ministry at the Quad is organized. Eventually Ryan Speicher agreed and at the last minute (he's been extremely busy lately) he was able to interview me over the phone on the couple of things he didn't already know for his reference and finish it right before the deadline. One major problem I was facing was that the website they were using to submit project applications was having serious problems on the day of the deadline because of how much traffic they were getting (and part of a certain question was broken so that I lost a lot of time trying to figure out a way to circumvent the problem), so the website frequently wouldn't load at all and even once you could get a logon screen it would randomly drop you without saving the changes I made. I decided that I wasn't going to go to the AFTERdark event the night of the deadline until the project was done and submitted (I only had that one problem question left to deal with and to hit the "Submit" button), but the problems with the website were so bad that I didn't get to AFTERdark until the very end (several hours later). Then, of course, they chose to extend the deadline so that it wouldn't have been an issue at all. I just wish they would have made that decision earlier so that I could go to the event.

AFTERdark was a combination concert/speaker sponsored by Athletes In Action and held in Elliot Hall. The band was Tait (led by a former member of dcTalk) and the speaker was a guy named Joe White who was the former football coach of Texas A&M and put on a dramatic presentation where he took on the role of a Roman cross builder and was pondering who Jesus really was while actually building a cross onstage.

The campus was blitzed with advertising for it on an absolutely massive scale. I really question their advertising tactics because all the promotional materials were worded very carefully to leave out just about any clue that it was a Christian event and promote it just as a "free concert." I'm not exactly comfortable with the idea of tricking people into hearing the gospel. How is using deception, even through omission, a Christ-like way to act? I'm also a little hesitant with presenting the gospel in such an emotionally charged (a certain friend who feels more strongly about it called it "emotionally manipulative") way because we want people to truly accept the gospel and not fall away when their emotions change. Granted, God can and does work in such events, and good follow-up with people who indicated decisions goes a long way to help (and it appears they are making a lot of effort to follow up on a timely basis with everyone who indicated a decision for Christ or a recommitment of their life), but I still question if it's the best way to go about things.

All of that being said, I wasn't able to be there for anything but the very tail end of the event, so I don't actually know what it was like. I'm just going on my thoughts from the extensive advertising and what people have told me. Please feel free to add your thoughts on my musings above via comments (yep, that was yet another shameless plug for comments). I did get to stop by Elliot that afternoon while Tait was doing a sound check and that was pretty cool (and I found out that the first thing Josh Weis did when he met Tait was teach him a bad Chuck Norris joke).

Chalk up one for the "Wall of Weird" (not really weird, just unusual):
Friday night I was supposed to go to a big concert down in Indy featuring Newsboys, TobyMac, Newsong, Zoegirl, and a couple others, all for $10 at the door, but that didn't exactly happen. I had found out about it a few days before and was having a hard time deciding between the concert and Cru, but figured that I'd go to the concert because it was such a good deal and Newsboys are one of my all-time favorite bands (and I could get a free ride down there with a group of guys going from the Quad). Friday evening at 5 I went to get some dinner before we hit the road at 5:45 and was having a really uneasy feeling about the whole thing. It was weird to have such a strong uneasiness about it because I was looking forward to the concert and all the details were coming together nicely, so there was no rational reason not to go as planned. So I decided to eat dinner by myself rather than with some guys from my floor and spend the time praying about it. The general gist of my prayers were asking that God would take away the strong uneasy feeling and give me peace about it if He wanted me to go to the concert. Well, He didn't, so I didn't. I still have no good ideas why He decided to tell me not to go to the concert, but that's how things go sometimes. I did find out later that there was a big accident on 65 on the way to Indy (2 semi's went off the road), so they were an hour late and decided to skip the concert and go go-carting and bowling instead, but another guy from my floor showed up at the same time they did and still managed to see Newsboys and TobyMac perform. Like I said, I still don't know why He said not to go, but I'm just trusting Him with it and glad that it was a strong enough feeling that I couldn't easily ignore it.

On a side note, the girls put together a really awesome/hilarious video advertising Women's Retreat this weekend and showed it at Cru. I especially have to thank them on behalf of the Cary guys because they included a special segment that was a nod specifically to our tradition of duct taping people. To the readers who were involved with that: is there any chance I could get a copy to post on here?

After Cru on Friday a bunch of us went over to Mer'dith to play cards and hang out. Eventually Shane decided he wanted to go hang out at Steak 'n Shake, but he realized that he needed some leverage to convince most of the group to come instead of dropping out on us. After talking with Kim, he concocted a plan to duct tape someone and use the hostage as a way of getting people to come (don't ask how the logic of that works: it does, but I don't want to dig into it enough to try to explain it right now). Then he consulted me, we talked for a few minutes about the intentions of the plot, and then I decided we should get Mike Papaik and proceeded to make it happen (and, in typical fashion, it worked just as I planned). In short order, Mike was very securely tied up and in Chip's truck on the way to SNS with the majority of the group following in various other cars. It was only after we'd been there about an hour that we let him have a dull knife from the SNS silverware to cut himself loose (took about a half hour). A few pics:
Getting tied up:

Standing outside waiting to be loaded into the truck:
One of our tables at SNS:
The table Mike was at:
We had one more table (the one I was at), but I'm afraid I didn't get any pictures of us. Sorry guys.

I think this should about cover it for now. I still have two or three things to talk about (mainly just pictures of two of them), but I'm going to be getting off work soon and I've given you plenty to read already.

Ok, fine, I'll give you a link as a parting gift for getting this far. This is a commercial in the UK for the new Honda Civic. Click on the link, skip the intro, click on the "Watch Civic" link on the upper left, and finally click the "Watch the Film" link if it doesn't start playing automatically. For the maximum experience, pause the clip until it finishes downloading (as signified by the colored bar filling in above the play controls) and make sure your volume is up. Oh, and one more thing: keep in mind as you watch it that EVERY sound you hear is made by the choir:
http://www.honda.co.uk/civic/

Creative Date

2006-01-25T13:05:00.000-05:00

Well, my prediction of getting extremely busy extremely quickly has certainly proven true in the time since my last 'real' update (barring topics that start with P like Picard, Pirates and Personal Sleep Patterns). Classes are "off to the races" (Prof. Fanjoy's trademark phrase), although being a flight major I don't have a lot of actual homework. :) For this post, I figure it would be worthwhile to cover Saturday's creative date, my Summer Project application, AFTERdark, Perelandra, and maybe even some linkage if you're lucky.

While at Christmas Conference, I hatched a fairly ambitious plan to do a lot more creative dates than normal this semester with my cell group and managed to sell the idea to Sean and Matt (the two other guys involved with leading the group) and the guys from the group who were at the conference. As part of that plan, we hit the ground running this semester with plans to start having creative dates right away, starting with the one last Saturday and the next one happening tonight. For those of you unfamiliar with the creative date concept, it is simply a time where a guys' cell group plans and does something with a girls' cell group to foster fellowship between each other. In the past, Cary has gone for quality over quantity in dates, creating such extremes as the Murder Mystery Night date last spring (which took a month of planning and a ton of time), but now we're trying to do a lot more in the way of simple dates.

Saturday night we had our date with the Windsor Monday cell group. Several of our guys weren't able to come, but the numbers balanced out nicely with 6 guys and 7 girls. We picked up the girls at Windsor and took them ice skating at the rink down by the river. One of the only problems we had the entire date was that we hadn't briefed the guys very well on the logistics of how we were going to pay for the girls at the rink, so we ended up standing at the entrance with me in the front yelling to all the guys in the back of the group to tell them what to do and they, conveniently, weren't really paying attention, so it kind of reflected poorly on our planning and me as being in charge of the whole thing. Oh well, just one of those logistical bugs to work out on the first date of the semester and make sure they don't happen again. The good news is that the girls were very gracious about it and once we got past it everyone had a lot of fun out on the ice.

The only other problem with the date was that some of the guys have never been on a creative date before (and it's been a really long time for some others), so they kind of needed to be reminded after a little while on the ice that they were supposed to mingle with the girls instead of just staying as a pack. Once that was taken care of though, they did a fantastic job and were able to get to know the girls and spend time with them. We skated for a little over an hour before everyone started getting tired. When it came time to leave, I was skating around telling everyone and a certain rat by the name of SARAH WILSON was kind enough to tag me 'it' in our game of tag right after everyone else was already off the ice! ;)

Then we went to Vienna (a local coffee house) and were able to warm up while sitting around talking and getting to know the people we hadn't really met before the date. We talked about what we were thinking of doing this summer (including what projects some of us are applying to) and Jenna got really excited when Amy told her of some deal that might provide a way for Jenna to go to France for a month next year. After a while of hanging out there, we drove the girls back to Windsor, declared the date a big success and called it a night.
Now, how about some pictures?

This is the 'nice' shot of the group while waiting for the Zamboni to finish with the ice:

Here is a silly picture taken a couple minutes later:

It didn't turn up well in the picture, but the group developed a fascination for blowing "smoke" (the condensation from your breath) at each other or just up in the air:

Some of the girls leaning over the ice:

Susan, Erin, and Jenna in the back seat of my car on the way to the coffee house (Sarah took the picture):

Sarah and I in the front seat of the car while stopped at a light:

Naturally, we had to also take a silly picture of the back seat:

According to the official story we were stopped at a red light when we took this picture (I won't be doing or saying anything to dispel that account of it):
For those of you who just got worried there (parents, grandparents, long forgotten distant cousins, etc), yes, we were actually stopped in that shot.

I don't know why Chris had to tamper with this good picture by giving Erin the ears while we were walking to the coffee shop, but he ignored me when I said not to:

After the date was over I was back in my room and got a Facebook message from Sarah. Apparently she had been hanging out with Amy and Amy told her to send me a note to listen to a certain techno song by Daft Punk saying that I'd like it. I recognized it from an iPod commercial a while back that I had liked, but I never knew the name of the song. So I thought I'd pass it along to you guys. Technologic by Daft Punk. Look for it on Cdigix if you're in the dorms or to watch the music video done by a creepy robot (have to mouse over the picture and choose Quicktime or Realplayer):
http://www.daftpunk.com

Well, I'm afraid I'm out of time for today. Some other things came up while I was at work and couldn't finish the other topics I wanted to cover. Until next time, keep your stick on the ice.

Pirates

2006-01-15T00:16:00.000-05:00

This is Johnny:

He lives across the hall from me, is a Cru cell group leader, and is known as our resident pirate. If you are an astute observer of the world around you (being a fan of "Pirates of the Caribbean" might also help), there are significantly less swashbucklers inhabiting our world today than there used to be. Why is that? Well, I might have an answer for you:

In my travels across the web, I recently came across a graph showing a startling correlation:
There you have it folks: global warming is to blame for this disturbing endangerment of the species swashbucklingus piratus.

Yet another bit of knowledge that's amazingly relevant to your daily life. It's a service I provide this stuff, you know...

Best Blonde Joke Ever...

2006-01-14T12:31:00.000-05:00

Found a link to the best blonde joke ever on Rob Bushway's blog this morning. Enjoy!
Best Blonde Joke Ever

Night Owls 1, Morning People 0

2006-01-13T01:35:00.000-05:00

What's this, another post in one night? Yep, and being posted at 1:35am I think it's an especially apt time for this one:

You've all heard Ben Franklin's old adage, "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise," and if you're a night owl, you hate it. Let's face it, fellow denizens of the night; we can't stand it when people throw this one at us to attack our sleep habits. Well, that's about to change...

Recent research at the University of Westminster has shown that "...early risers were more likely to suffer from muscle aches, colds, headaches, and mood swings..."

And another study in Britain of 1229 men and women over a 25-year period also shows "...those who burned the midnight oil and slept in the following morning ... also proved to be slightly wealthier than the early risers and no less healthy."

Of course, all this talking of sleep reminds me that I've been up for the last, well, you don't actually want to know how many hours I've been up, suffice to say that it's not a small number; so I'm gonna hit the sack.
G'night...

"Make It So"

2006-01-13T00:11:00.000-05:00

-Jean-Luc Picard, Captain, U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701D

Having recently come across a couple of hilarious videos about Captain Picard on Video.Google, I've decided to dedicate this post to the captain of what is by far the best Star Trek series: The Next Generation.

She's going to kill me for posting this, but my Mom has a thing for Picard. As she said a while ago while discussing balding (I believe the context was the reasons why bald should be left bald as opposed to a comb over, so this came out of nowhere), "I think bald is beautiful. Think of Captain Picard: he's a hunk!"

Found this online:
101 Reasons Picard is better thank Kirk as a Starship Captain
1. Two Words: better voice.
2. Picard's ship's counselor traded in her miniskirt for that great low-cut neckline.
3. Kirk fought over women. Picard had women fight over him.
4. Picard fire both photon torpedoes AND phasers at the same time when in battle.
5. Picard's ship is better than Kirk's -- better, faster, stronger.
6. Picard hates children -- Kirk once rescued a bunch of patricidal little maniacs, tried to console them, and almost lost his ship and crew in the process.
7. Picard was responsible for Beverly Crusher's husband dying, berated her son constantly in her presence, yet still managed to make her fall for him.
8. Though admittedly he's seldom a patron, Picard's ship actually has a BAR.
9. Kirk fought others himself, Picard has others do his fighting for him.
10. When nurse Chapel re-appeared as Troi's mother, she fell for Picard.
11. In seven years, Picard never developed a gut like Kirk's.
12. Picard was never killed by his first officer.
13. Picard's family made alcoholic beverages for a living.
14. Kirk kept losing security guards throughout each season; Picard has kept Worf for seven years.
15. No member of Picard's crew was EVER based on a member of the Monkees.
16. Two words: better actor.
17. Picard can do better impressions of his first officer.
18. Picard single-handedly saved the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and all of humanity while still a lowly captain.
19. Picard's a better musician than Kirk, while admittedly that's not saying much.
20. Picard's crew members sleep with one another on a regular basis.
21. Picard's crew gambles.
22. Picard's engine room has that neat warp coil that glows.
23. Picard's ship has better control panels instead of a series of Lite-Brite boards.
24. Picard would never star in a show like "T.J. Hooker."
25. Picard would never have allowed Charlie X aboard his ship.
26. No sideburns. 'Nuff said.
27. Picard's first officer never seized control of the ship to transport a former captain anywhere.
28. Despite the Borg incident, Picard is still welcome back at Starfleet HQ. Kirks name is an anathema to Starfleet HQ and alien races alike.
29. Picard never ordered his ship to self-destruct as a bluff; when he orders it to do so, he MEANS it.
30. Picard's ship was never taken over by its own computer and made to attack other Starfleet vessels.
31. Picard has never been made into a bad Filmation cartoon.
32. Picard was able to bring Denise Crosby back from the dead. Need we say more?
33. Picard infiltrated Romulus, posed as an intergalactic mercenary, and was tortured extensively after capture by the Cardassians -- and never broke a sweat.
34. Picard has never been demoted.
35. Picard has never had his body taken over by a former lover.
36. Picard has never developed amnesia and thought he was an Indian.
37. Picard has never encountered aliens from weird planets like "Zatar."
38. Picard's quarters have a window.
39. Nobody ever back-slaps Picard.
40. Picard was never involved in any hokey shootouts at the OK corral.
41. Picard is a caffeine addict. (All that Earl Grey tea.)
42. One word: Leadership.
43. Kirk is not a sex symbol. Never was, never will be.
44. If Picard had a son, he wouldn't lose a fight to a Klingon whose commander was Christopher Lloyd.
45. Speaking of losing, Picard has never lost a first officer to a man who once made a career out of selling Chrysler Cordobas, either.
46. Picard would never be so stupid as to go rock climbing without equipment and rely on an overweight first officer with rocket boots to save his butt.
47. Picard would never stand for playing "Row Row Row your boat" around a campfire.
48. When Picard enters a room, people fall silent; when Kirk enters one, they keep on drinking.
49. Picard has that cool, futuristic artificial heart.
50. When Picard has an alternate reality experience, it's worth watching and caring about.
51. Picard never expects the impossible from his engineer.
52. When Klingons are aboard Picard's ship, they don't go rampaging about with 17th century weaponry.
53. Picard has more class than Kirk ever had.
54. If poor judgment were bricks, Kirk would be a housing project.
55. Picard had the chutzpah to admit when he screwed up instead of putting on a face which only made things worse.
56. Picard doesn't rely on the Organians to help him settle intergalactic squabbles.
57. Picard gets along with the aliens aboard his ship.
58. It's unlikely Picard ever contracted a sexually-transmitted disease.
59. One word: diagnostic (Never heard it on the old show.)
60. All that cool technical jargon (Also never heard on old show.)
61. Picard has hair on his chest.
62. Picard can actually make being bald, middle-aged, and scrawny look sexy & macho.
63. Kirk sat alone in the middle of his bridge; Picard kept counselor Troi within easy reach and view at all times.
64. Picard has never mutinied or had his crew mutiny against him.
65. When Picard gets drunk, he tracks mud all over the house and gets in a fight. When Kirk gets drunk, he passes out.
66. Picard hired Whoopi Goldberg to work in his bar.
67. Picard is not afraid to mind-meld.
68. Picard's ex kept her name even after the divorce; Kirk's kept it a secret even from her son.
69. Picard likes solving mysteries; Kirk couldn't figure one out if he tried.
70. Picard has never messed up with the transporter.
71. Picard has never been bitten by a mugatto. Nor has he ever allowed shape-shifting salt vampires aboard his ship, either.
72. Picard has never aged prematurely.
73. Picard wasn't afraid to take on Satan.
74. Picard knows Gilgamesh & is able to recite it.
75. Picard argues with his captors while being tortured, Kirk merely screams in agony.
76. Picard never brought a woman back from the 20th Century only to have her blow him off in front of the entire Federation assembly.
77. When Picard talks, people listen.
78. If Picard were a late-night talk-show host, he'd be Dick Cavett. If Kirk were a late-night host, he'd be Chevy Chase.
79. NO ONE laughs when Picard's Doctor says, "He's dead, Jean-Luc."
80. Picard has never kissed a Romulan.
81. Picard has never crashed in San Francisco bay in a pirated spacecraft.
82. Picard would never have brought "Nomad" aboard his ship.
83. If Khan came aboard Picard's ship, Picard would have had the common sense to restrict what technical manuals he would've been allowed to review.
84. If Picard found a huge glowing sphere in the middle of outer space only to discover it was controlled by a child with an ugly puppet, he'd be pissed.
85. Picard would never ATTEMPT hand-to-hand combat with a gorn.
86. Picard would never have dropped the charges against Khan.
87. Kirk actually tried to defend the idea of intragalactic war with the Klingons.
88. When Kirk went back in time, he frequently messed with history to suit his own ends.
89. Picard probably would have found the Galileo 7 in less time than it took Kirk.
90. Three words: Better costume variety.
91. Kirk tries, usually unsuccessfully, to respect other cultures. Picard tries, usually successfully, to get other cultures to respect him.
92. Kirk's occasional game of choice is 3-D chess, Picard's is poker.
93. "Picard" has more syllables than "Kirk."
94. Can't forget those neat collar insignias.
95. Picard's not afraid to deal with more advanced cultures & has done so on a number of occasions.
96. Picard's been on both Klingon birds-of-prey AND the heavy cruisers (and lived to tell about it).
97. When Picard goes undercover, he makes it look easy.
98. Though Picard has contempt for aliens like the Cardassians, he doesn't let it show.
99. Kirk wears boots -- Picard wears shoes. And as we all know, it's gotta be the shoes...
100. Assimilating has never been a problem for Picard.
101. Picard has never trashed Gene Roddenberry.

Ok, now for those videos I mentioned at the start of the post. I don't know the story behind this first one (if it was part of an episode or just some random extra bit or what), but you can clearly see the influences of his career stage acting prior to Trek (the link takes you to video.google.com, where the clip will start playing automatically as it streams, if you have a slow connection you might want to pause it until the gray bar showing the amount downloaded so far fills up most the way for smooth playback):
http://tinyurl.com/ay8ww

I don't know who first made this, but I believe the "Picard Song" had been around the net for a while before someone made this video to go with it. Basically it's a bunch of lines from Picard remixed to a techno beat with video clips to match it. What's sad (or cool, depending on how you look at it), is that I actually recognize a significant majority of the clips it shows. Yeah...
(Same warning about streaming from above applies here; runtime is a little over 5 minutes)
http://tinyurl.com/7uw59

Feel free to comment on your thoughts of the video or additional pro-Picard reasons for the list above.

IndyCC

2006-01-09T18:43:00.000-05:00

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!

Merry Christmas!

2005-12-25T23:02:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas Everyone!

It's amazing, I go home on semester break expecting to have all this free time and find myself as busy as ever. I think in the future I'm going to have to demand a day off before I start RevTrak work on Monday right after break starts. I still haven't been able to catch up on my Purdue sleep deficit.

My grades came in a few days ago and they were pretty good overall. Not quite good enough to raise my GPA, but good enough that it didn't go down much. I'm most curious about the true meaning of the 'B' I got in King Air Ground (the class I had no idea how I was doing in) because our grades in that class are competitive against each other deciding who gets their first choice on when to co-pilot the King Air. I really don't care if it's this spring or in the fall, just as long as I don't have to stay at Purdue and do it this summer.

Despite all my double-and-triple checking to make sure I didn't forget anything when I came back to St. Charles for break, I realized a couple of days ago that I forgot something fairly important. I've decided to reformat the primary hard drive on my desktop computer over the break because it was getting to be somewhat unstable (thanks to McAfee and Norton not wanting to play well together causing a crash and me having to do a XP repair install earlier this fall). The problem is that after I went to all the work of backing up all my data and reformatting my hard drive, only then did I realize that I had forgotten my XP install disk at Purdue. [sarcasm]Way to go Shawn.[/sarcasm] So, I'll just have to wait until I get back to school before I can rebuild the machine. The good news is that my data is still safely backed-up on the secondary hard drive and my Tablet is still working nicely. Now, if the M4 crashes, I'm in trouble, but until then I'm ok.

Now my family is up in Minnesota at my grandparent's condo in the Minneapolis area. Mimi, my grandma on my Dad's side, flew up on Friday from Colorado Springs to join us and is on the plane back as I type this. The highlight of our trip is meeting Sam, my new cousin. Those of you with unusually good memories will remember that I just got a new cousin last July (Sarah), adopted from Guatemala. Well, now we have another one. My uncle and aunt (the same ones who got Sarah) adopted him when he was four days old this September. Both of his parents are originally from Guatemala, but he was born in southern Minnesota. He is the most easygoing kid you ever met. As long as he's happy at both ends (fed and otherwise cared for, if you catch my drift), he is perfectly happy with whatever's going on. It's really quite amazing. Sarah is also a blast. She's able to walk now (but she is only willing to walk more than a couple of feet if you walk with her and she can hold onto your hand).

Our plans are to stick around here tomorrow and then head back to St. Charles on Tuesday. Then Wednesday morning I leave for Indy Christmas Conference with Cru. I haven't been to IndyCC since I went with Chicago Metro Crusade back when I was with Elgin Community College. I'm just hoping we don't get a flat on the way there this time (quite a story to the last one).

Before I sign off to return to the Timothy Zahn novel I'm completely engrossed in (The Green and the Gray, but I'd also recommend pretty much anything of his if you want good sci-fi), I think it's been a while since I gave you guys any good links. For those of you who've heard that an engine from a 747 produces 58,000lbs of thrust and wondered just how much that really is, this is a clip for you. It comes from what I consider to be one of the funniest shows on TV, a British car show called Top Gear (you might want to pause it until enough of the video downloads so that you don't have to wait for it later):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1309610693318372088

Finals done

2005-12-16T17:26:00.000-05:00

Now my finals are complete,
and I think that's rather neat.
But the sleep will have to wait,
'cause I'm gonna be out late.

Finals

2005-12-12T12:19:00.000-05:00

It’s finals week, so here’s my exam schedule:

Monday (today)
AT 354 King Air Operations 7-9pm
Tuesday
AT 355 Boeing 727 Systems 1-3pm
Thursday
MUS 250 Music Appreciation, 3:20-5:20pm

All 3 exams are hard and I have to do well on all of them to keep my grades up. If it seems unfair that I only have these three, keep in mind that I’ve already taken two (Multi checkride and my sim checkride) and that I don’t have to take the AT 321 727 Operations final because of how I’m doing in the class. Please pray for me because I don’t have nearly enough time to study (especially for the 727 Systems tomorrow) and I have to do well.

One other side note, I saw Narnia twice on Friday and it’s amazing. I’ve said for a long time that if they do it right, it has the potential to rival Lord of the Rings for quality and I think I can safely say it does. If you haven’t seen it yet, go as soon as you can, it’s worth it. I was reading on the news that it grossed 67 million opening weekend in the US alone, making it the second largest opening weekend for any December-released film in history (topped only by LOTR: Return of the King), so I think we have a lot of potential for them to make more of the series.

Anyways, back to studying…