The goings on

Hey- So it's been awhile but now I'll try and catch you all up on what is going on. I'm still staying really busy with school but I'm in a groove now as far as schedule goes. I just had my first test in IR (International Relations) today and I think that went pretty good. My calc prof. is starting to load us down with homework. For those of you who have been through calc I, we have been doing related rates all week and it's been a lot of homework. The Harding University Lectureships where the beginning of this week so all Bible classes were canceled through Wed. That was nice although I have friends in that class that I missed seeing every day. The lectureships started on Sun. and so my choir sang that evening and that was a lot of fun. Choir is absolutely one of the highlights of my day now as I get further into this semester. We're starting some new music and it's going to sound sooooo cool when we get it learned. I'm still playing frisbee a lot and getting better at that. I'm glad we play so much because I'd probably get fat if I wasn't running so much :-) I'm starting to become good friends with the other guys on the team so that's making it a lot more fun. One other big thing that's relatively new is that I'm now part of a group called "One." It's a missions oriented club that was started by Nathan Holland (some of you know him) and some others a few years ago. It's purpose was to organize outreach opportunities for the school and the other missions groups here. The past year or so, it has started to decline and eventually at the start of this semester, those who had been leading it resigned and with their resignation the group basically died. Well there were some on campus, including some professors, that thought that One should continue. From there, the concept of One was discussed and some changes were made to the way they thought the group should work. Basically starting from the ground up they started rebuilding the idea of "One." The final conclusion was that One should consist of only five or six members that would serve as the head comity for the brainstorming and direction of events that would happen. One a plan had been made, One would then assign jobs to the other mission groups and would oversee the completion of the projects. The members would include students from the international missions group as well as the domestic missions group(Outreach America) and would help to tie the two groups together. Up to this point, international missions and domestic missions had not worked well together. I was asked to be a part of this comity and have been very involved ever since. We currently have four of us and are searching for another two or three people to complete our group. Since we have started meeting, God has greatly blessed us and opened many doors for us. We are currently working on multiple projects extending as far out as next school year. We met for two hours today and didn't even accomplish all we wanted to. If God continues to bless us, this will end up affecting the whole school in many good ways. Please pray that God gives us wisdom as we continue to push forward in this endeavor. Well I have to go to frisbee now so I'm going to leave it at that. God bless.

P.S. the network went down as soon as I tried to post this yesterday so just letting you know it is now Fri.

Pics

Hey, Amy and I just went through all the pictures I have on my computer and had a bunch printed and I thought it would be cool to post my favorite ones. This is kinda a random selection but hey, it's my blog so enjoy.

This one is from a few years ago but it's still one of my all time favorites. The other guy in it is a friend from New Mexico that is here at Harding with me.

This is from this summer. Adam is trying something we learned at the Highland Games...

...and here's me trying to one-up him.

This is on our hiking trip right before school I came to school.

The view was AWESOME!!

While it may look like I'm in love, it was just a fun evening.

Girls!!!!!

My last Faith Quest :(

Ok, so there were a few more I wanted to post but my computer doesn't want to so I guess that's it for now. I'll get a real post up soon. I promise.

FRIDAY!!!!!

It is now the weekend!!!!!!! I'm free (kinda) for two whole days!!
Yippeeeeeeeeee

Annoying classmates

Have you ever had a class where your classmates won't stop talking? Well my Bible class is like that. Our professor doesn't even tell them to quit, he just starts talking louder over the top of everyone! There's this one girl, (freshman) that "whispers" to people sitting half way across the room. It drives me nuts!

Anyway I just had to vent.

Team HUapocalypse

This weekend I went to my first Ultimate Frisbee tournament with the Frisbee team here at Harding (HU Apocalypse). The tournament was in Memphis which is about two and a half hours away from Searcy. We (there were about 11 of us) left on Friday Evening at about 7:00 and drove to Aaron’s house (of one of the guys that’s on the team) who lives in Memphis. We stayed there Friday night and got up and drove to the park where the tournament was, at about 9:00. The games started at 10:00am.

For those of you who are not familiar with Ultimate, here’s a quick overview on how it is played:
The field is 70yrds by 40yrds with 25yrd in-zones. The game itself is a mix between soccer and football and played with a disc (Frisbee). There are seven people on a team and the object is to catch the disc in your in-zone to score a point. Games are played to 15pts. You cannot run with the disc although you’re allowed three steps if you’re running when you catch it. The goal is to maneuver the disc between the players on your team and work it down the field and into your in-zone. If the disc touches the ground or is blocked or knocked down by the other team it’s a turnover or just a “turn” and the other team gets to take the disc from there. No picks are allowed. The person guarding the player with the disc is called the “marker.” The marker starts counting as soon as the player gets the disc (called the stall count). If the player with the disc does not throw the disc before the marker counts “ten” then it’s called a “stall” and the disc is turned over to the other team. One of the neat things that is unique to the sport of Ultimate is that there are no referees. Everything is called and decided by the players on the field. Fouls, picks, stalls, turns, ect. are all decided by both teams on the field. If a call is contested by a team and it can’t get worked out by the players on the field then the call goes to the person on the sidelines that had the best view of the play in question. Over all, it is a very fast paced game that requires not only stamina, but also the ability to handle the disc and work as a team to score points. I love it!!

So as I said, we arrived at the fields at 9:00 and found out we would be playing five games that day. We would be playing to 13 points with a hard top (time limit) at 1hr and 15min. Our fist four games were to be back-to-back. Knowing what we had to face, we started our fist game. The game went very well and we won, 13- 6. Still pumped up from the last game, we disposed of the next team, 13-5. So on we went to game 3, starting to feel effects of running solid for the past 3 hours. After a pretty evenly matched game we again came away the victors with a 13-10 win. Our fourth game, we started getting tired. We were up against one of the best teams in the tournament and we were dragging. After a hard fought battle we came away with a humiliating 3-13 loss. After that game we finally got an hour-and-a-half break. We got something to eat and came back to play our final game of the day at 5:30pm. But even after a break, we couldn’t pull it together. We lost again with a score of 5-13. That night we all crashed hard on the floor of Aaron’s house.

The next morning after a short church service with the team, we went back out to the park for our final game before seeding. To make a long story short, we lost that game as well (2-13) to make our record 3-3. Because of our record we got 4th seed and ended up playing again the team we had just lost to. :-( If we could pull it together, we had a chance at second place for the tournament. The first half of the game went much like the game before, and we were down 3-7 at the half. After halftime, the game changed. With a couple critical turnovers, we made a run and at the next timeout had narrowed their lead to 2 with the score 7-9. But it wasn’t enough. The opposing team rallied together and finished us off 8-13 placing us fourth in the tournament.

While this may sound very depressing, I’m actually thrilled at how we played and the things I learned at this tournament. The time I got to spend with the other guys on the team was great as well the lessons we learned about working as a team. We know what we need to work on in practice now. In the future, we will definitely be a force to be reckoned with. :)

A Quick Update

Ok, for those of you who maybe don’t know anything about what I’m doing I’m going to do a quick catch-up.

I’m at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. I’ve been here since Aug. 18. I drove down with my roommate, who is one of my best friends from church back home. We left The Sun. of that week and ended up getting here on Wed. the 18.
School started a week later and I’ve been extremely busy since. I had a hard time trying to make a schedule, and my advisor and I spent over and hour and a half trying to figure out classes that I could take. It was hard, because of a few things. One because I didn’t register until I got to school, while most of the other freshmen came during the summer to what Harding calls “Summer Experience” and registered then. So a lot of classes, even the freshmen classes, were already closed. The second thing that made it difficult was that I transferred in 30 credit hours which basically puts me at sophomore level (that’s nice) but that was just that many more classes I’d already taken. So in the end we finally figured some stuff out for me to take. I’m only taking 14 credits but with the classes I’m taking, it keeps me more than busy.

The classes I’m taking are: Calculus I, Western Civilization, International Relations, New Testament Survey and Concert Choir. My Calc class takes a lot of time, sometimes I work on calc homework for 3hrs a night on top of my other homework. My Western Civ. Teacher is really mean and hates freshmen and there’s a lot of reading I have to do for that. My IR professor is the head of security here, so I have to be sure and not get caught doing anything…questionable J My NT professor is the new missionary in residence here at Harding and I don’t know how much experience he has teaching, which makes the class really easy (I just got a 99% on our last test). So as a whole I stay pretty busy with my classes.

When I’m not in classes or doing homework, most often I’m playing ultimate Frisbee. I’ve joined the Ultimate Frisbee here at Harding and absolutely loving it! The team is just a group of guys who love the sport and we play five times a week with two of those times being organized practice. We have practice on Mon. nights and Thurs. nights for just the team, and then on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons we have free-for-all games where anyone can come and play. We have about 25 of us on the team and when we have open games sometimes as many as 60 people will show up to play. It’s great fun! Throughout the semester, the team goes to tournaments in and out of the state. I’m actually leaving in about and hour and a half to go to our fist one this weekend. Wish us luck!

Well aside from all of that, I think the hardest thing for me has been getting use to Arkansas and the difference of the people from the south from the people from home. Arkansas weather is incredibly different from the NW. It was over 100deg the whole fist week I was here and it has only slowly cooled down since then. Today was about the nicest we’ve had and it was 85deg. It’s rained a few times but it still stays very hot even when it’s raining. The difference between people from the NW and people here is just as drastic to me as the weather. It’s not bad, but it’s just different. I don’t know how to describe it, because I’m still trying to figure it out, so you’ll just have to be content whit that for now.

Well I’ve spent longer on this than I meant to so I’ve got to get going, but there’s the quick update.

First Post

Ok I just created this blog for the purpose of keeping people updated about my life. I'm not going to make any promises, but I'll at least post occationally.

Test

I'm just seeing how this works