Texas Trip

This is take three on this post! Once, i got interuptted, and the next time i tried working on it, my computer froze half way through. This is for real, I promise.
Well, I'm back from yet another Spring Break. Sorry I didn't get any posts from the road up, but you know how it goes. It was a very fun and relaxing week, despite having to go back to school .
And I didn't get any birthday cake. But I can still survive.
To start out with, my parents got into town on Friday night. We left the next morning for Wichita, Kansas, the birthplace of Caleb Sommerville. We also went to my parents old church and ate lunch with some old friends of their's from church too.
We then headed off to Oklahoma City to visit some other old friends. Back when we lived in Columbia, Missouri, our family adopted a college student from MU. He would come over for dinner and we would swordfight with a whiffleball bat and tee. You know, normal stuff. Anyways, he started bringing a girl with him, and they ended up getting married and now have four kids. One of which has out-Star Wars-ed me in his collection. It was quite impressive. After that exhausting visit, we headed down to Austin, Texas.
The first day in Austin was spent primarily shopping. That wasn't so bad, but the fact that I couldn't really buy anything (it was my birthday on the 26th) kind of put a hamper on that. We visited various sightseeing places there, including the impressive Capitol building and Mansfield Dam.
On the way out of Austin, we stopped at LBJ's birthplace farm type thing. It was pretty interesting.
Then it was on to San Antonio. We had a hotel right on the Riverwalk, a historic canal with shops and really good resturants (and expensive; we ended up eating at Joe's Crab Shack, which is still yummy). The Alamo was probably the most interesting thing on the trip. I had no idea there was so much history surrounding that little white church. Mom and I saw an IMAX film about the battle, too. It would've sucked to be a Texan.
On the way back to Lawrence, we stopped in a little town called Lindsborg, Kansas. It's a Swedish community for whatever reason, and has a lot of great little shops and B&Bs.
There. Whew!
That's the vacation stuff. The most fun part was being with my crazy family. Whether it be taking odd and occasionally banned pictures, or just singing nonsensical songs about nothing, we had a lot of fun together.
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Pictures can be found on my photobucket account. The link is the the "linxx" bar on the right side of the screen.

Photo #7

Damage to Danforth Chapel

 

Spring Break

Hello all. Sorry if you couldn't access my blog. Blogger took everything offline because of some server problems, but it should be all fixed now.
Tomorrow I am leaving for Texas with my family for Spring Break. I will definitely have many pictures and stories to post, but I haven't decided if I'm bringing my computer down there, so it may be a week or so until the next post.
Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Photo #6

I will be highlighting my favorite aftermath pictures for the next few entries. Devastation in front of Robinson Gym

 

Life as Normal

Life has returned to normal here in Lawrence. The storm that whipped through here has now been classified as a "microburst." From all the news releases and stuff, I think that a microburst is a sudden burst of downward air from a thunderstorm. Other than that, i really don't know the technical parts of it. The paper said that the winds produced were about the same as those produced by an F1 tornado. Damage on campus has been estimated at around 6 milllion dollars. Cleanup has been amazing. All that remains to serve as a reminder is the occasional tree branch or workers fixing a roof.
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In other news, it's only a few more days until Spring Break starts! My family and I will be in Texas for a week, so no updates here until I get back. I'll be sure to post a buncha pictures and stories and whatnot.
That's all for now.

STORM

Well, I've survived my first real Kansas storm. Allow me to elaborate.
This morning, I woke up at 8 to take my shower and get ready for church. I was somewhat lazy and slow, which turned out to be a good thing. I looked out the window and noticed that it was pretty darn windy. The sky looked pretty funky, also. I closed my window, and jumped in the shower. As soon as I turned on the water, the power went out. I dried myself off quickly and looked out the window. It sounded like a hurricane was blowing perfectly perpendicular to our building, straight into the windows. My ears went crazy because of the extreme pressure flucuations. The wind was blasting through the seams of the window, and I was getting a little nervous. "Alrighty...the gust should be dying down now..." I thought. But nope, it just kept getting louder. Then the tornado sirens went off. I was still in my towel. I quickly threw on a tshirt and jeans and my sandals and ran into the hall to find Shmuel running down the hall pounding on doors. He confirmed the tornado, and I helped him knock on doors. Half-dressed and half-awake, the residents of Templin stumbled down the stairs. We hung out for probably 20 or 30 minutes, and then went to see if we still had rooms.
Everything on our floor was fine. Then we looked out our windows.
A list of the damages on campus is as follows:
-several broken car windows
-Air-conditioning unit blown OFF OF THE ROOF
-Three totaled cars
-hundreds of downed trees (some two or three feet thick were snapped in half)
-The "K" on the "KU" flag on top of Fraser is missing
-Tar paper and roofing tiles from Fraser, Marvin, Murphy, Snow, Budig, Dyche, The Union, Danforth, Robinson, Stauffer-Flint and probably many more
-downed power lines
-shingle damage
and probably many more I haven't even heard about.
Stefan and I went out to look around campus at around 11:00am (now the news guys are telling everyone "not to sightsee"). We took pieces of roofing tiles from Dyche (the natural history museum), Stauffer-Flint(the journalism building) and several others as souvenirs. We came back to Templin, dropped off our tiles, and went to eat at Mrs. E's. Afterwards, I came back to my room to watch the news, when I saw the next storm. Thankfully it missed us, but we had to go back to the basement for another 20 minutes or so. Hopefully it's all over now. They might cancel class for tomorrow, but we won't know until 8:00pm tonight.
All the pictures of this will be up on my photobucket account. The link is right here.
And such has been my very exciting day!

The Chalk Is Back

For those of you unfamiliar with the lovely feature of college campuses called chalk, let me fill you in. Sidewalk chalk has made a comeback not only with the 4-7 age range, but also the 18-22 range. Instead of just flyers, which are also quite prevalent here, they chalk the sidewalks and even the sides of buildings in order to draw attention to usually a party ("NEON-Thursday at the Granada" is one I swore I've seen since the first week of school) or some group running for something. Lately (and I'll try to get a picture up of this) there has been an inundation of chalkings advertising something called "Delta Force." Don't ask me what it is, I still don't have a darn clue.
Which brings me to my question. Does all that effort of drawing "Delta Force: Change now!" or "Delta Force: The new pink," (what?) really affect what the students think? Most students don't have a dang clue what the heck Delta Force is, and I doubt many of them really care. If they explained themselves better, perhaps they would have a better chance of doing whatever it is they're trying to do.
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In other news, there isn't any. Well, this morning I heard a buncha sirens across campus, but that's about the extent of my excitement. That, and the orange hightops are back in service after their winter hiatus.

Photo #5

Old Bikes at ManMaker

 

Happenings

I forgot to write about my advising time with some lady from the J-school earlier. She basically mapped out my entire college career in 15 minutes! Now, I probably won't follow it exactly, but it looks like I will probably be done in 4 years. After I fufill all the requirements for a journalism degree, I will still have to take 20-30 more hours. I don't remember the exact number. I am still thinking about a possible minor in something, but I'm still pumped that I will most likely be done in 4.
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Anyone watch the Oscars last night? I watched the last half or so. Mostly because Jon Stewart was hosting, and he's awesome. That stupid Brokeback won a few, including (barf) best soundtrack! My main man John Williams was up for two (Memoirs of a Geisha and Munich) and he didn't win. My heart goes out to you, Johnny. The fact that "Crash" won best picture made me laugh, because everyone was talking about how Brokebackwhatsit was gonna sweep the show. I am glad it didn't, and I shall leave it at that.
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That's all for now.

ManMaker!

It was a lot of fun! The way everyone was limping back home though, it was more like Old Man maker.
I really learned a lot this weekend. The theme was "A Time for War." And while things like lust were talked about, we went a whole lot deeper. I won't go into details, because I can't really remember what exact points were. The main thing that I learned is that we are in a battle. They used a clip from "The Two Towers" to explain that. Gandalf is explaining to King Theoden that they have to ride out and attack the enemy head on. Theoden is reluctant, and Aragorn says "Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not." We hav eto make this an offensive battle, not a defensive one. We watched several Lord of the Rings clips, and the last one we watched was Theoden's speech to his riders on the fields of the last big battle. I really learned a lot and thank God for that awesome opportunity.
We also had fun. Whether it be trying to light a charcoal fire (as seen on the left) or donning extreme facial hair (as modeled by our fearless leader Matt Podzsus on the right). Now to explain the rather mysterious "Trash Smash." I do not have any pictures yet, but I hope to soon. Here's the setup: There's a big trash can weighted down with several large rocks in the middle of a field. We were split up into teams of 6 or 7 (only 5 per team played at one time) and began the fun. Basically there are two rules. One is try as hard as you can to get the football into the trash can, and the other one is that there are no other rules. Basically you tackle, block, jump, elbow, dive and whatever else you can make your body do in order to either defend the goal or get the ball in. It was quite invigoriating, to say the least. By the end of 5 games, I was spent. I twisted my ankle a little and somehow decided that my right knee was the only thing that could hit the ground first, which it did several times. Other than that, there's a few bruises and arching muscles, but no major injuries.
And now, some more pictures for your enjoyment.

Male Bonding again!

I'm off for another weekend of fun male bonding in another 2 hours. I doubt there will be any paintballing, but there is something called "Trash Smash" which will the take the place of the violence part. As i said a few days ago, this thing is called "ManMaker," so hopefully i will learn how to be a man.
Or something.
No more pictures until Sunday afternoon probably.

Photo #4

In The Air

 

Photo #3

Ravine near Palm Springs, CA