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February 25, 2007
CDs, Chairs & Concerts Anew
New things and new experiences are usually fun. I've had actually quite a few this week, more than usual, I'd say. Not all of them are new, mind you, but some just don't happen very often.
Take, for instance, purchasing CDs. I'm not sure how many years it had been since I last bought a CD... maybe three? At any rate, it'd been a long time. On Monday I decided to order the CD "That's That" by Blue James Band, a fairly new, West Coast-group I discovered on Pandora.com. I'd say their music is kind of a mix between Guster, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews, fairly acoustic, and the lead singer's voice is very pleasant to listen to. The first time I heard one of their songs, "Remember Me," I absolutely fell in love with their music, and after hearing a couple other songs by them, they became one of my favourite bands right away. Their CD wasn't available on Amazon or anything, and it was only $10 including shipping directly from their website, so I got it from there. I had it shipped to Walker Building, and it arrived on Thursday. I opened it up, and there was a handwritten note on a post-it note from the lead singer. Since "Dept. of Meteorology, Penn State University" was in the address, he made a few weather jokes and thanked me for supporting their music. Totally cool! And unexpected!
This is a pretty mundane new thing, but I got a new chair for my office. Well, again, not new, but a used chair from the Weather Station. Diane from the office was letting people swap those chairs in exchange for tossing out a corresponding number of old/broken chairs, so that the number of chairs in each office would remain the same. So Walter & I swapped out four from our office. Yeah, it was that bad. It's so nice having chairs that actually work, though. And reasonably comfortable too. As word spread around 4th floor several other people did the same, so there were quite a few chairs put on the dumpster by the loading dock. It definitely seems like the grad student's offices have previously been treated as places to store junk by the department, judging from the number of broken chairs/furniture scattered about.
I also don't often go to live concerts very often. If I discount all bands that I've heard in bars/pubs and other free concerts (like student groups, which is pretty fair, I think), then the only live concert I'd ever been to before was Weird Al Yankovic at the Minnesota State Fair three summers ago, believe it or not. Well, this Friday night I went to the Chris Tomlin/Matt Redman concert at the Bryce Jordan Center here on campus, as part of their national "How Great Is Our God" tour. It was absolutely fantastic! Very moving, powerful stuff. There were several points through the evening when I got a couple tears in my eyes, but especially during Chris Tomlin's version of "Amazing Grace," which he also recorded for the new movie "Amazing Grace" that just came out in theaters this weekend (about the life of 1800s European abolitionist William Wilberforce). That song always gets me. :-) 
The concert lasted three hours, but it was less like a regular concert and more like a big long worship service, it was awesome! It even had a sermon-type message given in the middle by Louie Giglio, a really amazing speaker who gives some awe-inspiring messages that really try to convey how big and powerful yet loving and caring a God we serve. I also bought three albums (four CDs, one Matt Redman, one Chris Tomlin, and a two-CD multi-artist compliation) and a poster for $35. So now after not buying a CD for almost three years, I've suddenly bought four albums in a single week. Totally wasn't expecting that.
In the also-new, but definitely less fun category would go learning about finite element method and doing an assignment on it for my Numerical PDEs class. I even went to the Engineering Library over in Hammond Building on Wednesday to check out a couple of books on the topic, to help give me a clue what's going on. (Incidentally, that was the first time I'd ever checked anything out from a Penn State library.) The assignment's taking tons of time, and Andrew & I aren't making as much headway on it as we had hoped. I even spent 12 consecutive hours in Walker today (Saturday); I didn't even leave the building for lunch, we had a pizza delivered. Kind of pathetic, I know. But I'm not gonna complain about the course, that's what I'm endeavoring to give up for Lent, hehe (doing something special for Lent is also a new thing for me).
And speaking of Lent, I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that I went with Kerrie, Andrew, Jeff, Bob & John to the Ash Wednesday service at the Catholic church this week. I'd been to a couple of short Lutheran Ash Wednesday chapel services back at Gustavus, and I was curious to see how the Catholics did it. I left before communion though, because I had to meet people for "Theology Pub" at Otto's for PSCG Men's Group.
Anyway, now that I've caught up on most of the new things that have been happening with me recently, I think it's time for bed!
Posted by Jared at February 25, 2007 01:20 AM