Operation Christmas Child

It’s good to be back in State College. The workshop was starting to get really exhausting, especially with so many of the talks being rather dull and/or obtuse, in addition to the obligatory talks given by some foreign scientists speaking an almost unintelligible form of English (I think). Also, the organizer wasn’t bulldogish enough about keeping the presenters on schedule that they wound up taking away half of our lunch period, again. Ugh. By the final afternoon of the workshop on Thursday was the actual workshop portion of the workshop — they had everyone (and by everyone, I mean the half of the attendees that were still there on the third day) split up into different working groups to discuss various issues and come up with recommendations. Thing is, that was such little time for all these issues to be decided upon in the groups and then discussed with the rest of the attendees, that all the discussion had to be wrapped up a bit prematurely, causing everyone to request more workshop and less conference at the next workshop, whenever it’s held. If that makes sense… Anyway, Sue & Dave will be debriefing Walter & me tomorrow morning about what we learned at the conference. We’ll see if I learned enough to satisfy them…
Yesterday was a busy day. After watching Penn State and their anemic offense lose to Wisconsin 13-3, it was time to head over to Nittany Mall to meet up with a few other people from Penn State Christian Grads. As a group we were getting together to buy a bunch of gifts for Operation Christmas Child, a ministry run by Samaritan’s Purse. After we bought a bunch of gifts we all went back to Ed & Ellen’s place to wrap them and play some games once we were done with that. All told we filled up eight shoeboxes, one each for boys and girls in the 2-4 and 5-9 age ranges, and then two shoeboxes for boys and girls in the 10-14 range; we figured that for toy drives the older kids usually get overlooked a bit, so we decided to have extra shoeboxes for that category. We have no idea what country or countries our shoeboxes will get sent to, but hopefully they’ll touch the lives of the kids that receive them, and their families.
Late Saturday night I joined a bunch of the meteo grads at Zeno’s to watch “Cootie Brown,” a jazz funk/fusion band that Jacob plays in on the congas and other auxilliary percussion. It was their first gig in State College, and we were all excited to go hear them. They played in Lemont once this summer but I couldn’t make it (I was bummed I didn’t get to hear the song about the Lemont-ster!), so I was really looking forward to this. And I must say, Cootie Brown is definitely the best band that I’ve heard in State College in my year-plus of living here. There’s such an oversaturation of 80s/90s cover bands that it’s refreshing to hear something different. That, and I really like that kind of music too. 🙂 The owner of Zeno’s was pointed out to me, and I told him, “You guys really should hire Cootie Brown more often,” to which he replied, “They’ll be back.” (And this was before he went on stage and jammed out with them during one of their last songs!) A few of us stuck around for both sets, all the the until they finished at 2:15am, so I was tired today but it was very worth it! I had tons of fun, and I can’t wait until they play again here in State College!