Alleluia, Christ Arose!

I don’t believe I’ve ever had to clear snow off of my car on an Easter morning before, certainly not in April anyway. That’s exactly what I had to do this year, there was a good 4-5 inches of extremely fluffy snow that kind of came out of nowhere overnight. I think we got anti-State College Effect-ed on that one. Add in the flurries we got earlier today, and we’ve now had at least a trace of snow for 7 consecutive days, which has got to be close to an all-time record for April here in State College. With this being one of the coldest Aprils on record across much of the USA, the global warming alarmists have had to tone it down a bit, thankfully.
Church was really good on Resurrection Sunday. The 10:30 service was totally packed (it’s usually full, but more so than usual this week), and it was awesome hearing everyone sing so loudly and joyously, celebrating Christ’s resurrection from the dead. He Is Risen!
Following church I went over to Tracy’s place for an Easter dinner with a few people from Penn State Christian Grads – Tracy (obviously), Stephanie, Kerrie, Ruth, Ruth’s roommate (forgot her name, doh), Caleb, Alita & Daniel. It was really nice and relaxed, and everyone brought such good food, I was stuffed by the end. And there was heaps of candy as well, I think I ate almost two months’ worth of sweets on Sunday. For the meal I decided to make some meatballs in my crock pot, so that’s what I spent a chunk of time doing on Saturday. I’d never made meatballs before, but I think they turned out okay… And then after the PSCG Easter lunch it was time to head up to Houserville for an Easter dinner with some of the meteo grads at Jeff, Vic & Bob’s house. More food, including very tasty ham. 🙂
After getting stuffed for a second time then we had PSCG Bible study over at Anna’s. I was leading this week, but since it was Resurrection Sunday, I had the group deviate from whatever would originally have been planned. Instead of reading a short passage and discussing it for a long time like we usually do, I thought it’d be good to just read straight through the accounts of the Holy Week events (triumphal entry, last supper, Jesus’ arrest, crucifixion & resurrection) in all four gospels. I think we all found it quite instructive to see how similar they all are, yet how each writer chose to place more or less emphasis on certain events, enough to make them all clearly unique. It took a bit longer than I’d expected, though, so the additional stuff I’d also planned to get to (passages from Acts, 1 Corinthians & 1 Peter about the resurrection) we’ll just do this coming week instead. It certainly doesn’t hurt to think of Christ’s resurrection on more than just Easter!
This is the season of thesis defenses, with pretty much everyone who’s graduating in the spring defending either last week or this week (Addison, Ben, Margaret, Daniel & Amy have already gone, with Amber, Kerrie & Jonathan due up). I’ve been trying to make as many of them as I can too, to support all my friends. Daniel’s defense was yesterday, and he did really well at it, it was a fantastic and easy-to-understand presentation. Congratulations, Daniel! Last night I threw a lasagna in the oven for Daniel, Katie, Jon, Steph & Kerrie, to celebrate Daniel passing his defense, and of course to watch another episode of the Jack Bauer Hour. Because my Aussie friends that read this are probably still 3-4 episodes behind the US, I won’t spoil anything that happens, but this week’s episode of 24 was absolutely fantastic! I think my head’s still spinning from all the twists and turns!
I’ve spent a good chunk of this evening uploading a bunch of videos to my Movies page, at long last. Believe it or not, I was even further behind on those (2 years) than I am on my Photos (1 year). After church on Sunday I downloaded Kim & Max’s pictures from their camera onto my computer, so now I have everyone’s photos from last month’s Katrina relief trip. The week after I got back from Louisiana I made a slideshow/movie about the trip from everyone’s photos, so yesterday I updated the slideshow/movie with some of their pictures. I’ve put that online now too, in the Penn State section. I’ve shown the older version to a few of you, but not the newer version yet, so feel free to check it out! The music I set it to is “Yes and Amen” by Matt Redman.
Last night I also finally got around to watching “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a movie/documentary aired in Britain on BBC 4 last month (duration 1 hour, 15 minutes). It’s an absolute must-see film, setting the record straight about climate change and what’s really the most likely culprit causing the bulk of it. The science seemed pretty sound for the most part too. There were a couple little oversimplifications I caught early on, but overall I thought it was quite well done. Hopefully this film will be looked back on someday as a turning point in the whole global warming/climate change debate, because it absolutely destroys the anthropogenic warming alarmism that’s so rampant nowadays. I downloaded it the other day just fine, but different sites are springing up offering it for download as Google goes around shutting them down, so any URL I’d link to would certainly be inactive within days at best. If you want to see it, just do a Google search for “Great Global Warming Swindle” and something’ll certainly come up. Or I can burn you a CD if you wish. Just let me know if you’re interested. I’d love to watch it again anyway!