P-Ball and Recitals

The past few days have been fun but busy. Last Thursday we were hitting golf balls outside again, which was nice. I still have a horrible, horrible slice (like, I mean it’s really bad), but then occasionally I was able to hit it reasonably straight, so at least I know there’s some hope for me yet. Thursday evening was also an interesting Prepare Ministries, as everyone who had been on the spring break missions trip to the Dominican Republic shared their experiences and the things they took away from the trip, good and bad. And afterwards John & I finally decided on what we were gonna do for our astrophysics project that’s coming up — we’re gonna be looking for asteroids. That’ll probably be fairly frustrating and tedious, but hopefully it’ll be a cool project. And ya never know, maybe we can discover an as-yet undetected asteroid, that’d be sweet. 🙂
Friday evening after class I showed up to play frisbee with the physics club, but unfortunately only six other people showed up, making it a less than satisfying frisbee game. It’s been kinda disappointing how so many of the SPS events this semester have been so poorly attended, we don’t know what the deal is. So after only 45 minutes of that, Carl, Cory & I all went to Paul Fraser’s recital in Bjorling. It was amazing! Paul had composed all the music that was performed that night, and it was awesome! Everything from rhythm section quartets (where he played piano) to a tuba/euphonium octet (four of each, Paul on tuba), to a couple of pieces for a concert band (PWO, Paul’s Wind Orchestra, which he conducted), and then finally a really fun piece featuring the piano that he’d written for the band Organ Donors that I thought was the best of the night (it was tough trying to decide which one was best, since they were all so excellent). All of Paul’s music at the recital had a distinct modern jazz/jazz rock feel to it, it was really cool. And also at the recital I saw my friend Meghan LaVelle, whom I hadn’t seen since last school year, so it was awesome catching up with her again and hearing about her experiences so far in nursing school. After the recital, Seth, Cory, Carl & I went over to Carl & Seth’s apartment in College View to hang out and watch the last half of the Twins home opener (which they lost 5-1, blah).
Saturday was Preview Day, so I had to work from 9-2:45 for Admissions. One of the things we had to do was give a “Traditions Tour,” which is a tour showing some more unconventional things and vantage points around campus (and emphasizing our personal experiences), since most of these people had already visited campus four or five times, and were just wanting to get a final look/feel for the college before making their decision on where to go. Then I also helped out with the Study Abroad session with five other returnee students, so that was fun. It’s always great getting to share to people about your experiences abroad, it brings me back so many good memories of Australia and New Zealand. And then after a group full campus tour, it was time for me to get ready for P-Ball! I got all dressed up (and even tied my own tie, and on just the second try! … that’s huge for me, considering I haven’t really done it before, and not at all in about a year, hehe), and I met up with Jolene, Carl & Seth in Olin, because we were going to kidnap Cory and take him along to President’s Ball. We had convinced Paul (physics prof) to tell Cory that he had to come in for research at 4pm on Saturday, but instead of Paul meeting him here in Olin, we did with a bunch of dress clothes we’d stealthily taken from his closet (with the aid of Cory’s roommate Greg) the night before. Once Cory saw how big of an operation it was to try to get him to go to P-Ball, he decided to come along, hehe. And just like everyone else (including myself), he had a fun night there. President’s Ball, for the second year in a row, was at International Market Square in Minneapolis, a pretty cool setting for it. I rode up in Carl’s van with some people, we all just went as friends which was cool. Zach, Jolene, Emma & Sara were the string quartet that was booked to play during the meal, so we got to sit with them at one of the best tables. 🙂 Then the Steve Wright Big Band started up with some jazz tunes, and everyone started dancing the night away, it was cool (my one complaint about the band is that they left far too much time in between songs, it absolutely killed the atmosphere each and every time). I really can’t dance very well, but nobody cared about that (in fact, not many people outside of the Swing Club, which put on quite a display with a couple of numbers, could dance all that well), so I danced with lots of people. The music and dancing stopped at midnight, which is when we all headed back to GAC for the night.
Early Sunday afternoon it was time for Zach and Emma’s violin recital in Bjorling. All of 202 (except John, who decided to be elsewhere) was even in attendance. It was a good recital too, they played some violin duets by Bela Bartok that were quite enjoyable, and Zach performed an entire violin concerto for the first time ever in a performance, so he was quite relieved to be done with that. Afterwards it was work work work until 1:30am doing my entire astrophysics assignment, minus the hour and a half for astro lab and the hour-plus playing an intramural frisbee game. Yep, the physics majors have formed an intramural frisbee team yet again, this one is called “The Dave Fowler Fan Club.” We had nine people show up, which was pretty good, so we could at least have a couple subs for most of the game. But like every other year, every other IM frisbee team is from the Gustavus Ultimate Frisbee team, which is kinda lame in my opinion, because it’s like having the varsity men’s basketball team form a couple intramural basketball teams to compete against everyone else on campus. Because we were playing actual frisbee players, we lost something like 20-4 (we stopped keeping track of their score after awhile). I was involved in every score for our team, either throwing or catching, so that was cool. Our team did suffer an injury though, when Cory took on of my tosses in the face. Here’s what happened. I saw Peter wide open way downfield, so I chucked it pretty low (head height), hard and straight. Well, I didn’t see Cory behind a defender about 8-10 feet in front of me, so right after I released the frisbee, Cory made a hard cut across the field, right into the path of the frisbee. Fortunately it only appeared to cut his nose and not break it, but he still had to leave the game for good. When Cory called Dave and told him about his frisbee injury, Dave thought that was really cool, lol (Dave also took a frisbee in the head once).
Monday was just kinda long, I was just exhausted most of the day, and almost napped right through the general physics lab I’m supposed to TA every week, hehe. In the evening I finally watched another episode of “24,” after missing the last three episodes because of physics seminars and our little East Coast road trip. My one question about this week’s “24” is, if you’re camping out in the desert, and big chunks of a jumbo jet (such as Air Force One) crash a couple hundred feet away from your tent, how do you either a) not hear it, or b) question whether that big explosion you heard was real? And since I haven’t seen the previous three episodes, I’m not up to speed on what all has happened, but that veep (now prez) is definitely in on the terrorist attacks. No worries, Jack Bauer will probably take him out in two or three episodes. 🙂 Later on Monday night I went to Men’s Christian Fellowship, which was interesting as usual, but afterwards I talked for quite awhile with Micah about all sorts of stuff. For awhile we were standing out in the rain, before we moved inside Confer for a bit until S&S closed the building and kicked us out, and then we continued just talking out in the rain for awhile more, it was cool. At any rate, I was really surprised when I got back to the section to see that it was 1am. I thought it was only around midnight or so, but in fact I’d been talking to him for two whole hours. I guess time flies when you’re having fun. 🙂
Today (Tuesday), since it was cold and still kinda crappy outside, our golf class was inside in the Lund Arena, where a mini-golf course had been set up for us. Believe it or not, this was my first-ever game of mini-golf. Seriously, I’d never played it before. But apart from knocking John’s ball in the hole for an eagle with my ball on hole 1, and triple bogeying the insanely hard hole 9, I think I did fairly well with a +7. I can’t wait for the next time it rains on a Tuesday or Thursday, so we can play mini-golf again! And in Senior Sem this afternoon, a bunch of the people who took Senior Sem last semester showed up for snack time, as a surprise to most everyone in the class. Carl brought some tea and scones, mmmm so good. 🙂 After supper Cory & Al decided to test the “high velocity produce ordinance” cannon (a spud cannon, essentially) that they’d made just for fun in the last couple weeks to shoot t-shirts. So we took this big two-meter long pvc-pipe cannon out to the football field, and twice got t-shirts to fly 50 yards, woohoo! I took a couple movies of the firings of the cannon, and I’ve put them on my Movies page, in addition to a bunch of movies I took in New Zealand. Anyway, we don’t know what S&S would say if they saw us with the cannon, but we’re planning on firing it pretty much every day from now to the end of the school year, hehe. Oh and I also found out today that I got a space in the on-campus grad student housing at Penn State for this coming school year, woohoo!
And like I’ve put a couple new movies on my Movies page, I’ve also put quite a few new photo albums on my Photos page. While I was on the road trip to the East Coast, during some of the time that I was just riding in the back seat, I was able to get a bunch of albums ready to upload, so I was able to finish the albums from the entire two weeks that my parents were down in Australia and New Zealand, plus a couple more of after they left NZ. Who knows when I’ll find some chunks of time to finish the albums for the rest of my time in New Zealand, it might very well end up being this summer. Maybe then I’d also be able to throw up some albums from this spring at Gustavus. But at least now I’m caught up to almost mid-December 2004 on my photo albums. 🙂 I hope you enjoy them, let me know what you think.
The other day I saw this story on The Australian about some French guy who was able to calculate the 13th root of a 200-digit number in his head (no writing or typing allowed) in nine minutes. But apparently that took him awhile, because a few months ago he smashed the world record by mentally calculating the 13th root of a 100-digit number in a mere 3.62 seconds. Heck, I can hardly come up with the square root of a two- or three-digit number in 3 seconds. It boggles my mind just trying to think about how someone could calculate something like that in their head so quickly.