I remembered to put a title in this little box!

Well, this may be the last homework-free day for awhile (I really don't know), so I figured I'd write up some stuff.

This week was going to be crazy ridiculous. Dr. Enick had 3 progress reports due - Monday, Wednesday and Friday (normally there's one a week, and that's plenty) - so I called off work and Charlie and I battened down the hatches and worked on Sunday to prepare for the storm. And then we finished the Wednesday one, Enick moved the Friday one (finished now) to Monday, and... and.. I didn't know what to do with myself!

Lessee.. so what did I do this week? Hush, Johnny Cash, I can't think. I wish my feet weren't so cold! I can sit on the hearth and get my rear end sore and my back hot, or I can sit on the couch and be comfy, but either way my feet sit on the floor and get icy. Um...

Sunday I went down to Pitt after the Steeler's game at the Harvey's and Charface and I worked on the distillation columns progress report. I wrote about Monday and stuff. Tuesday...I don't remember. My Fall Fitness Challenge Log sheet says I did an hour-long tough workout at home, so I guess I did that. Oh yeah! I did crazy hard stuff on the Elliptical and got my heart rate up to about 180, which is faster than the heart rate monitor can measure, and I was breathing so hard my throat was torn up the next day and I thought I was getting sick. I know I did other stuff Tuesday.. gosh, I can't remember! The day is lost! Seriously. That's why I started this journal - so I wouldn't lose days, or worse, whole seasons and memories and mindsets, to "the faulty camera in your mind," to quote Death Cab for Cutie.

Wednesday was sweet 'cause I worked out for an hour and twenty minutes with no cardio. Which means it was all lifting, which means it was pretty much my longest workout ever. It felt so good to have plenty of time and just get to work whatever I felt like, come back for a second round, and thoroughly work everything. And I wasn't even too sore Thursday, which was quite encouraging. After working out me and Charlie hit the pipes report and I wrote down all the info from our styrene plant simulation to be able to write the detailed description at home.

I didn't write it that night, 'cause.. I think I just got home sorta late and wasted time or did something.. Nate couldn't get together with me and Jonathan, so we just hung around like usual I think.
Thursday was wonderful! My facebook status, posted at 9:04am, was "John is going back to sleep! NO LAB TODAY!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh." I indeed sorta overslept, and before fully rousing and rushing to leave by 9:30 I decided to check courseweb on the off chance that I wasn't remembering correctly and it was team set II's lab, not team set I that day. I really thought it was set I, but there was enough of a grain of doubt to make me check.
Ohh, how glorious the feeling when I saw "Team Set II" on the 26th! I could sleep! I had nothing till history of the symphony at 1, and no homework for that class, and no huge load that demanded I rise and work at it! So I slept till 12:15 and barely made it to Pitt in time for HotS :-) That was nice, though I always hate it after I've slept in so late 'cause half of the day is just gone.

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I have returned from my expedition to procure a coat from the basement hallway with which to mitigate the onsetting chill tempered weakly by my white "Life. God's Gift" T-shirt. I have returned bearing snacks: Gruesomely splitered chunks of bulk dark chocolate (and by bulk I mean big honkin' 1-inch-thick blocks that stubbornly resist cutting, breaking or in any way fragmenting), an 8oz. glass of whole milk, half a tube of Pizza-licious Pringles (3/$3 at Walgreens baby!), and violet-flavored candies. I still haven't turned music back on 'cause I'm thinking quite well right now and I think it would just distract me.

Class was good Thursday--typical. I am greatly enjoying the pittance of knowledge I'm gleaning from this class (relative to the breadth and depth of the genre, not the quality of instruction. Dr. Nisnevich is actually fantastic - I like to just "sit at her feet," so to speak, and listen to the knowlege she spits out off-hand as she talks about different composers. Her Russian accent is sweet too), and the XM Radio lets me apply it, since I know the composer and title of what I'm listening to. Hah, bet I threw you a little off guard there with that massive parenthetical section. Eeheehee I'm an evil text genius! Anyway, this chocolate is good and so is History of the Symphony, and after class I barely got symphony tickets in time and then I picked up the CSA farm basket, ate an apple from it, and got home kinda late in the afternoon.

The rest of that afternoon and awhile after dinner I wrote the detailed plant description, which actually went really well. Given my paragraphs and tables, you could fully recreate our plant simulation in Aspen. Yeeah meean, bully for us! Thursday night I worked out, even though I didn't feel like I had to 'cause Kayte was at least 2 days behind. But I did.

Friday I skipped though, 'cause I was gone from 7:50am to 1:30am. I had 5 hours of class plus 30 minutes of watching me and Charlie's Health & Safety presentation with Dr. Murphy (Pretty helpful. I wasn't prepared enough), then 45 minutes drive to work, 4 hours of work, and an hour to pick up Katie Caldwell, hit Sheetz for an energy drink (No Rockstar Juiced! BOOOOOO and waaaah) and find a parking garage near Heinz Hall. Yes folks, we were going to the symphony! Shannon was alllmost late, but barely got there in time, and we plopped into our seats wayyyy up in the gallery 30 seconds before the lights dimmed and Brahms filled the hall.
I followed along in the program with his three choral pieces, trying to pick out enough of the Mendelsohn Choir's German to track where we were and read off the English translation to the right. They were "heathenish" German poems about the ancient Greeks and gods and stuff, and knowing the words really made the music cool and fitting. Pretty miserable view of life though: The god's have it great, and everybody on earth is hopeless and pretty much screwed. The end. Pfft. Yay for Christianity, man. Yay for Jesus! as Steph would say :-)
After the intermission the lights dimmed again, we dutifully clapped for the conductor, and they launched into Beethoven's 5th - a moment I'd been looking forward to for weeks. It was amazing listening to the music with some knowledge (just enough to be dangerous :-) ). I truly enjoyed every second of the symphony, and even arrived at a few critiquing conclusions (like I thought the violins were too quiet in general, especially in the beginning)--a sign to me that I'm listening and processing at a viable level. I marveled many times at how perfectly Beethoven constructed the whole thing--every variation of the themes and motifs, every instrument, all the progressions and blossoming storylines of sound...
Bah, here I am falling into the same grandiose language to describe Beethoven that everybody else uses. Phooey that. It was great music. Just like Jars of Clay, Switchfoot and Relient K's latest albums: so good you can just sit back and marvel at where they take you and how they take you there.
I.. mm.. I was both happy because of the music, and quite happy because I was actually happy from the music; music which before meant little if anything to me. [I have my own convention for semicolons, so don't whine about it please :-P]

I was quite happy to applaud long and loud when it was finished, though I would have preferred the orchestra to take a few bows instead of the conductor walking out again and again and acting like he was all the schnitz and he'd done that all and we were all clapping for him. I don't think he was actually that proud, but that's sort of my reaction to the convention of focus on the conductor. Somebody (Shannon I think) said our orchestra is the 6th best in the world, according to somebody, and that made me pretty proud of our little city.

After the concert we got back to the car through the soaked and gleaming streets and headed to Oakland for some chillin' action. The coffee houses were closed, and all I could think of was Fuel & Fuddle, so we headed there, got some beverages, and hit up the half-price Flying Buffalo pizza after 11pm. Sooo goood! I obeyed Dad's care group exhortations and headed up some conversation about what God's doing in our lives and where we seem to be headed, and that was really nice. Shannon and Katie are great girls, and it was nice to have some time to talk and mull over life. Oh yeah! Before I thought of F&F we swung by Benedum and I gave Shannon and Katie a quickie tour of the ChemE classrooms. That was fun to show somebody else these central parts of my life right now, and maybe it'll help Katie as she evaluates the possibilities of engineering and Pitt. Good times.

OK so.. speeding up 'cause I've made another HUGE post for crying out loud, we come to Saturday. Slept till 11:15 'cause it was rainy so I couldn't mow the back like I was gonna. Did some minor yardwork for Mom, ate some brunch, arranged for Mike and Matt and Jonathan to come with me to visit Heather and Waynesburg, and then did that. Yay for finally getting to visit Hezz! It was a lot of fun goin' on a road trip with the brothers Q and the brother Hughes, and even though it was cold, rainy, soaking wet and lots of people were gone from campus, we had a pretty nice time. Heather's dorm and room are sweet - nice and homey feeling, which is unusual for dorms IME*. We flopped about there for awhile, walked around the hillside campus for awhile, and kinda killed some time sittin around like the vultures in Jungle Book. Eventually we hit up "The Lamb Garden" for dinner in *woooo* Downtown Waynesburgh!! :-P It's a funny tiny little town. But the General Tso's was good, and we had some nice talkin' amidst the raucous humor :-) After din din we hung around the lounge in some cool building and played pool and watched some MIB and generally lolled around by ourselves in a place that would normally be full of people, which is always fun and funky. We ended up rolling down the dark wet roads to Sheetz with 7 people crammed in my car--pretty much the thing to do in Wburgh :-) That wrapped up the evening, and Hezz, Brian and Doug walked back to campus while we headed off into the night watching Strong Bad emails on my iPod. A pretty unusual day. I might be back to Waynesburgh in awhile to play for a coffeehouse if Heather follows through with her idea, which would be SWEET SWEETNESS. Gaaah, that'd be perfect! Hopefully it'll work out.

Today, Sunday.. I played electric guitar at church and many people said afterward that it was great, and most said that it also helped them worship, which is always amazing and gratifying and hard to believe God would let me do something so fun and actually have it serve His people in a nontrivial way. Joel preached an excellent sermon on 2nd Peter 3, continuing our series on Heaven and eternity. Mr. Calano is done leading children's ministry now, which is amazing since he's been doing it for eight and a half years. That's really cool that he can be freed up to lead his care group, and also that Mr. Graham is leading children's ministry now. He'll do a great job :-) It's cool to see people stepping up in new ways in the church--Tim McCullough is taking the function support team, Rob's taking children's ministry, Joel's got a team (including me!) for the upcoming college ministry.. Good stuff.
Mom, Dad and I swung by Iva Mae's to give her some CD's and got to catch up on her post-op condition. She is doing quite well now, and literally seemed to radiate light from her face. She is such a woman of God, and so full of genuine, simple joy in Him! She's a foshizzle saint :-) And Lisa is definitely a sweet pea, as Iva called her :-)
Then it was to the picture framers, where I got a short, deep nap in the car. Then, at last, to Taco Bell! Cheesy Gordita Crunches, talk about eternity, and sunshine on our shoulders all made us happy. And the Mountain Dew made me high. Yes, it's a Baja Blast Mountain Dew hi-igh. I've seen it rainin' soda from the fountainnn... oh nevermind, I can't make this fit with John Denver.

Steeler's game at our house with Mike, Shannon, Steve, all 3 Hugheses, Nate Sarah and Katie. Terrible loss to the Raiders. Loss of hope, but still fun times with cool people. Now I'm tired of writing, I've made another monstrous post, and it's gettin' close to 1am. The Pringles are good, and I still haven't had a violet candy.

School starts back up, and the week moves on. They're goin' fast man, and graduation is I think only 6 weeks or so away. Yikes.

Have a good week all yous peoples out dere! Big up yo'self, future self.

Scratch that bit about the violet candy. Mmmmm . . . .

--Clear Ambassador


*In My Experience