Don’t Panic

Like the subject line says, I hope none of you out there were panicking just because I didn’t have a post up in the last week. Not a whole lot was going on except for the last couple of days, but I’ll try to recap.
Last Monday was a long day, like most Mondays are. Too much to do on too little sleep. John & I were supposed to have our Astrophysics lab report turned in, but SigmaPlot was giving us lots of grief (and Carl was having major issues with it too), so instead of using SigmaPlot to fit a curve to our data, Carl just drew one in Microsoft Word, and then he gave us a copy of it to use in ours. We were open and honest in the text of the lab report about what we did (something like, “the value we got doesn’t agree with the accepted value because we drew the fit by hand in Word and pulled the value out of thin air”). Chuck actually was laughing out loud when he was reading them, and although he made us redo them for real, he got a kick out of sharing them with the General Physics class, hehe. I’m glad we can have a cool prof like Chuck that we can joke around with like that, and who understands that sometimes stuff just doesn’t work for whatever reason. Monday evening was cool because of another riveting “24” episode (I love that show!!!), and then another good Men’s Christian Fellowship. Matt Swenson also asked me to lead MCF this coming Monday, so I’ve been working a bit this week on preparing for that.
It’s fun when your only class during the day is Jazz Dance at 12:30. That’s what happened to me on Tuesday, hehe. It was raining and nasty out so Golf was cancelled, and there was no Senior Sem due to conferences. Nice and relaxing day. And then Proclaim in the evenings is always fun too.
Wednesday… what happened Wednesday? Oh yeah, an Astrophysics test that was so long we have to finish it this weekend. Ridiculous. But I also installed Mac OS 10.4 on my computer! It’s pretty cool, with a few neat new things added from OS 10.3, like Dashboard, which is a collection of widgets you can put on your desktop, including stuff like weather forecasts (my favourite!!), a dictionary/thesaurus, the yellow pages, and a unit converter (which should come in handy on future homework :-). The downside from installing that is that when I backed up my entire system onto my external hard drive, I somehow neglected to back up my music library (20 gigs) or my applications. Major bummer. But fortunately most of the music I had was either on Borg or on CD’s that I have in my room, so when I get some time I’ll be able to almost fully replenish my music collection. Oh, and for St Ansgar’s Chorus, we finally started rehearsing in the Chapel, getting ready for our concert that’s coming up in a week, the night of May 8th at 7pm. Any of you on campus should definitely come to it! I’m excited that I’ll finally get to be a part of a concert here on campus, instead of just being a spectator. 🙂
Thursday I had my senior sem conference with Byron & Florence, going over what I’m gonna talk about in my big final paper coming up, and how I’m gonna arrange it and all that. I told them that I hadn’t really thought much about what I was gonna talk about in it, but then I mentioned a couple ideas about what I for sure wanted to include and how, which wound up basically covering everything the paper was supposed to, at which point they said it sounded like I actually had a really good idea what I wanted to do. Hmm, I guess they have a point. 🙂 Did anyone out there catch President Bush’s news conference on Thursday evening? I thought it was awesome, and that he was on top of his game explaining everything, and making the case for his agenda. I mean, when even Matt Engel comes around (for the most part) to Bush’s side when he talks about the voluntary Social Security private accounts, he’s gotta be doing pretty good. After that the rest of my roommates went to Mankato to see “Kung Fu Hustle,” but I stayed behind so I could go to Prepare Ministries, which was really good. We were all discussing ways to improve outreach on the campus, through new things we could do, or building upon existing things. It was really exciting and encouraging to hear all of the ideas people are coming up with for things to do next year, and even the short time remaining this year. And afterwards Cara asked me if I would be able to give my Proclaim talk this coming Tuesday, instead of May 10th, so now since then I’ve been kicking it into high gear editing and tweaking my talk. And Gary also volunteered to take a look at it and offer suggestions and feedback, which was really nice of him.
On Friday our new physics t-shirts came in. The company screwed up and put the back design on the front, and the front on the back, but people voted to keep them and take the $2 discount they were offering us per shirt. It still looks fine. I also took care of getting my lease, deposit, and first month’s rent mailed into Penn State (to confirm living in the on-campus grad student apartments, yay!), and I also ordered a cell phone! If you go to the top of this page, it’s the phone listed at the top of the page, the Motorola V551 with Cingular. I’m excited to be getting a mobile phone finally! Zach also ordered the same phone, they should both be here sometime next week. In the afternoon I also stopped by the Student Senate’s Cold Stone Ice Cream Social. Mmmm, 50 buckets of “free” ice cream for the student body… For supper I went over to Jolene and Jess’s apartment with Carl & Zach for some pizza (regular and dessert, yum) and beer, before a quick stop at physics volleyball, which was followed by Johanna’s oboe recital in Bjorling. It was a pretty cool recital, she was even accompanied by Joseph Robinson, the retiring principal oboist for the New York Philharmonic. He came to play in her recital because six years ago when she was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, Johanna got to play next to Joseph in a New York Philharmonic concert through Make-A-Wish, which was pretty sweet. For an encore they played a really hilarious song that I really sounded like something Peter Shickele (PDQ Bach) could’ve written for two oboes, hehe. After the recital I went down to Mankato with Carl, Christian, Josh J., Cory, Erika, Joni & Mike P. to go see “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Man, what an awesome movie! I haven’t read the books yet, but now I really want to! My favourite parts were definitely Marvin the morose and manic depressive robot, the improbability drive, and the thoughts of a free-falling sperm whale, lol.
This morning (Saturday) I worked for Admissions, for Preview Day, a big group visit day for high school juniors. I was on the Academic Life Panel, and in the second panel a really cool kid from Chaska came up to me and started asking me a bunch of questions about meteorology, because he’s also interested in it. 🙂 And when I got back to my computer I also had a nice chat over IM with a prospie from Utah who stumbled onto my website, saw my screen name, and wanted to ask me some questions about Gustavus. So that was pretty cool, that my website was actually useful to someone! 😉 This afternoon I spent some time editing my Proclaim talk and getting a few more verses ready for my MCF talk. I’m also excited because last night I managed to find an mp3 of Dr. S.M. Lockridge’s “My King” sermon on the internet!! (Just click on the link, and then click on the download button for “speech mp3.”) That’s gonna be the cornerstone of my talk, and I’d been planning on just reading the transcript of it, but now that I have an mp3 of it I can actually play it for people. It’s so electrifying! For supper I went to Subway with Josh & Heidi, and happened to run into Tom & Su Beran there, I hadn’t seen them in ages, it was good catching up with them again. And then tonight I went to the Ginny Owens concert up in Alumni Hall. Anders was the intro act, followed by Bjorn Ostrom from Bethel, before Ginny came on. Ginny Owens is a Dove Award-winning singer (the Dove Awards are essentially the Christian music version of the Grammy Awards), who happens to be blind. But she can still sing and play the keyboard pretty well, and is coming along at learning the guitar. Her music has a nice soft, easy listening feel to it, which is quite pleasant. It’s so cool that we can get kinda big name artists to come to Gustavus like Ginny.
Well, tomorrow’s gonna be a super-fun day. After church I get to work on Astrophysics all day. An assignment that I haven’t started yet, a lab report that I haven’t even started the analysis for yet, a test that I have to finish, and another couple of labs to take data/pictures for in the evening. Sigh. Maybe I won’t have time to play in the frisbee game after all… So I have all that to do, in addition to continuing to hone my MCF and Proclaim talks. Uffda, it’s gonna be a late night tomorrow. Meaning I should get to bed now. And tomorrow they’re talkin about a possible rain-snow mix. Eww. Where has spring gone? It’s been so chilly here the last two weeks… Well, hasta luego everyone!