The week(end)

Good evening! I should be making my slides for the presentation tomorrow morning, but instead I figured I'd jot down the weekend (and the week preceding) before more life happens.

Last week was:
- Daniel and Dad hiking in the West
- Jonathan moving in
- Grandma and Grandpa coming here
- Mom getting degallbladdered
- ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY FINAL
- Discovering a B+ in kinetics lab. Proof positive that I'm a slacker don't-give-a-rip senior who needs to graduate (as also evidenced by the very creation of this blog post)

- Hah! Post mis-typed is psot, which just looks really funny. Like...a scientific-sounding term for a no good vagabond or something.

The A-chem final was a big deal. That class started deceptively easily for our cocky hero, who consequently found himself fighting to learn the material while doing no homework and attending no recitations (both optional). Our hero also has an inexplicable mental block when it comes to electricity, so electrochemistry required hours of brain pounding to instill even a paltry level of workable understanding. Our hero found himself a heroic gypsy student all day Thursday--heroically roaming the Pitt campus armed with only his A-chem notes, food, an iPod, plenty of money, a car, a Starbucks giftcard, everything in his backpack, and the impending doom of a three-hour test at 6:00pm to determine if he would slip once again from his "A" pinnacle. The studying was ok, but the test was truly miserable. Especially the first hour. Our hero found himself very un-heroically considering the effect on his grade and grade point average if he skipped the final, because his brain was so knotted up and overloaded that he couldn't imagine spending three heroic hours buffeting his cpu over the test. But he had truly heroic friends praying for him, and after awhile his little brain was peaced (made at peace), and he indeed, heroically, completed the final. And unless he sucks worse than he thinks he did, he'll get a heroic "A."

Mom got surgicized Thursday morning (the reason from Grandma and Grandpa's visit). She got her gall bladder out arthroscopically (best case scenario), and according to the doc it really needed to come out. Yay! Hopefully that will fix the problems she's been having. She slept off the happy gas for a few hours and then G&G brought her home. The main thing she's been dealing with since then, besides the soreness and weirdness in her abdomen, is the knifing pain in her shoulders from air bubbles rising up through her body. They blow air in the incision to let the surgeon see and work, and the bits of that remaining end up causing some very painful days. But she's doing well, the bubbleses are gone, and she's moving about more and more easily now. Yay!

Friday was cool. I had class (the last real kinetics lecture), came home, lolled around, and then that evening went to a frisbee game that Justin invited me to. heather, Anna, Justin and the Schuch brothers were the only church people there. The others were folks from Campus Life and high school. So I got to meet some of the people Daniel has been getting to know, and we had 3 hours of mad frisbee. Everybody was tolerably to terribly good, and we played under the lights till they shut off a little after 11 (something my brain had never had to process before: being outside and it suddenly becoming utterly and impenetrably dark). The folks were great, and some of us hit up Wendy's afterwards. I was beat up, though, especially from the second game. The front of my waist, the part that get's scrunched up when you move your leg forward, was so sore that every walk back after a goal was an exploration of pain. But it was, as Jeph would put it, a glorious night.

Saturday I was RUDELY awakend at the EARLY hour of 10:30 by these two DIRTY guys barging in from SOMEWHERE out west. Bearing fine leather belts and shiny belt buckles, bedraped with authentic cowboy shirts, and bedecked with a genuine cowboy hat, Dad and Daniel made their reentry. Jonathan was gone for the weekend so that cut down on the flurry, but there were still lots of cars swimming around the driveway and streetside. Saturday evening was the senior night Youth Parent Care Group, where Daniel, Justin and Heather made their parting remarks to the group and got encouraged and prayed-for by all. I still haven't come up with an effective mental picture of life without those three living here, but soon that will become a moot point. It shall be interesting to see the reshaping of YPCG once those three pillars of leadership leave. That night we invited Justin to spend the night at our house, so Dad went home, we made a cameo at a grad party with Justin, and then we spent a couple hours laying in the bed of his pickup in the Wal-mart parking lot talking about stuff and looking at the nostars in the sky. Good time. Mmm.

I woke up this morning to the sound of the dogs barking for their breakfast. I had no idea where I was, when I had fallen asleep, what was going on, and what had gone on. Turns out I had curled up on the little couch after we got back last night, from which position I proceeded to conk out. Justin left early for setup and I left soon after to play electric guitar. Which went well. As did the service. Our hero decided to forgo caffeine, tired of leaning on it to stay awake and alive, and that ended up being a heroically good call, 'cause he felt much better throughout the day. Which consisted of church, lunch at the food court, and frisbee at Quinlisk park. It was a tough game insomuchas the humidity was stifling, compounding the 90+ degree heat, and several of us were already battered from Friday's game. But it was a great game insomuchas the players were good, not too competitive, and we made good plays. Afterwards several cars hit up Get-Go for drinks and snacks, proceeding thenceforth to the Quinlisks for hangeth outing. Our hero ended up sleeping on a couch from sheer exhaustion after his heroic efforts of the previous days.

Daniel and I brought dinner home from the Quinlisks, which we then ate, and now Daniel got his hair cut, folks are sitting outside chatting in the waning light, and I'm almost finished with a sweet and timely blog post. Bully!

One day last week--Thursday I think--I had an apricot. They were the first apricots Mom had gotten this year. I picked a ripe-feeling one, but it ended up being over-ripe. One might describe its texture as mushy. One might describe the eating experience as mish mish. YAAAAHHAHAHAAA!!! :-D True story.

Time to do, like, work and stuff, and watch pictures from the west, and get much-needed sleep before presentation practice at 8am tomorrow. Boo.

--Clear Ambassador