Hey, why don’t we call ourselves Take 16?!?
-Konrad Krabill

My mother told me there would be days like this.
-David Krabill

Four men standing in a roughly diamond-shaped configuration. One has his eyes closed. Another is standing quite still. Another is bouncing around, waving arms, flexing knees. And the other is something of a combination of the other three. All are singing, with pop filters and microphones directly in front of them. All realize that energy is required to nail this song, and all go about generating that energy in a different way.

Kon’s the one with his eyes closed. I don’t see how he does it. I close my eyes and immediately become disoriented and unable to concentrate on what I’m singing because I’m concentrating on the fact that I’m closing my eyes. David’s the statute. He just stands there and sings. I’m the bouncy one. I figure if I’m going to inject energy into my vocal the energy needs to be felt by the rest of my body. I could probably benefit from an injection of David’s technique. And Tom, though closer to David than to me, tends to move around a little bit.

It looks like Troubles Roll Away is in the bag. I’m happy with it. In every take you end up with something that someone would have liked to get better, and this one is no exception. That’s the process of recording, at least for us. It’s a solid take, Tom really carries it. He sort of forces/sets the tempo and we play off of him. And he loves it because it’s a barnburner and it’s barbershop and it has a hot tag.

In a crazy twist, I literally didn’t see Randy awake at all from Monday morning until late Thursday night. He was working late, and I was leaving way before he got up. It’s sort of weird, living in the same room with a guy that you haven’t really seen in days.

Randy sold an ugly vest (I think those were his words) on Ebay for $1. But he got $5 shipping out of it. He said he was going to ship it as cheaply as possible.

If you want to see how some students rated one of my professors, Dr. Dean Jensen, go here: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?sid=742&tid=169343 . He’s a great guy, but of course there are always going to be people that completely rag on a teacher, that turn out not to like him at all through no fault of his own. He tends to be pretty straightforward (some would say dry) in his lectures, and his jokes can be groaners, but I’m not going to bag on a guy who--at the end of Spring Term when students were feverishly trying to finish up a Term Project in his class—went home, ate supper and came back to the computer lab and stayed until really, really late to help us. And he’s also the guy who’s quite possibly getting me an internship.

Tomorrow is a photo shoot. It’ll be wild. We’re doing it all ourselves, but I shouldn’t say we, because I’m not involved in the shooting. That’s Kon’s and Randy’s domain. And Tom's too maybe. This will be very wild. Who knows how it’ll turn out. But you know it, you know it, oh yes you do: I’ll let you know.

I wasn’t sure about Campus Crusade at first. Lots of people, loud music. It’s held at a place called Club Escape. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but it was built as a nightclub for students. On Wednesday nights, however, it’s taken over by Crusade, definitely not a smoky, bar-like atmosphere. It was nice to walk up and see people carrying Bibles, a refreshing change from the norm on campus. I wasn’t really convinced that I’d come back until part way through the speaker’s message, though, when God began to speak to me.

He spoke to me about sharing Christ. I fight what I know God wants, and that is to share my faith. I’m scared about it. But maybe I have the wrong approach. It’s not about putting people on the spot by immediately shoving what I believe at them, but it’s much more about living your faith out and having such a vibrant relationship with Jesus that it spills out in my daily life wherever I am. God hasn’t given us the spirit of timidity, but of power. Not an in-your-face, down-your-throat mentality, but a freedom and lack of self-consciousness about the most important thing in our lives. I haven’t worked it out practically, but this is the direction in which I’m thinking and hopefully heading.

Before the Crusade meeting last night there was an IIE Meeting. IIE (Institute for Industrial Engineers) Meetings are where you can get free pizza and pop. Thus, people show up. This time, the department head (read: big-wig), Rick Billo, came and spoke about the IME program, giving what he called his Undergrad Recruiting presentation.

This man is a fascinating one. He’s probably in his 50s, and by all appearances he’s your typical business/administrative type. But that’s before you see him move or hear him talk. At that point he’s pure energy. An unmistakable Type-A personality. The most remarkable thing about him to me, though, is how he tries to identify with the students. He uses language that some (me for sure) would consider unprofessional, but I think it’s him trying to get down to the student’s level. Does it work? Maybe the for some, but not for me. Since I perceive that he is trying to come down to the average student’s level (in this case take the word "average" to mean students who swear on a regular basis; this has nothing to do with their acedemic acumen), he’s completely missing me. It’s like, if you want to successfully “come down” to someone’s level in any endeavor, you don’t want them to realize that you’re “coming down.” Ask any teenager, they hate being talked down to. Well, Dr. Billo isn’t talking down to us, but he’s obviously trying to get down, and that just does not work with me.

A rare double-dip.

I saw a guy that looked like Jeremy Hershberger two days ago.

There's a guy in my class that looks sort of like Dalton, the one that married Grace used-to-be Kauffman.

That's all.

If someone is addicted to Thanksgiving leftovers, can they quit cold turkey?
-Michael Moore

About this faith and trust in God thing. I’ve been thinking about Abraham. If ever there was an immediate future that looked dark it was when God told Abraham to go kill his son as a sacrifice to God. A good God telling a man to kill his son. That’s hard for me to swallow even sitting here 4,000 years later. Can you imagine actually being in that impossible situation. The amount of faith he had in God is unfathomable to me. But somehow he had enough trust to at least go through the motions of preparing this sacrifice. Of course, God didn’t let him go through with it, and Abraham not only was provided with a wonderful alternative (the ram), he was also rewarded big-time, if you look later on in that chapter. Trust.

AHQ rehearsed again last night. Actually, we mostly just recorded. We got some decent stuff, a good take of the Stand in Awe Medley and also a possible keeper of The Invocation. Hopefully they’ll stand up to the stiff day-after-recorded test.

Tonight I’m going to check out the Campus Crusade meeting here on campus.

I’m into official declarations right now. With that in mind, I officially declare myself back in the school groove. I got to school early today and pounded out a good, solid chunk of homework. Regretfully, at 9:30, I had to pick up and go to class.

I am not at peace with my future, I struggle sometimes with what is set before me. Sometimes I’m ok with it and then BOOM! I start to wonder again. It comes back to that old thing, trusting God. He’s working, He knows what’s best, He’s got it under control...I think. See what I mean?

Now I hear you, now I don't,
I thought you spoke to me.
But that was then and now I'm not
Sure it's s'posed to be.
Can I trust you Lord to move?
And show me where to go?
I know it may be wrong to ask,
But Lord I want to know.

“The closer we get to the end of October, the more keepers we get.”
-Konrad Krabill

What is Industrial Engineering? If you’ve asked me before you’ve probably realized it is sort of hard to get a grasp on. It’s hard for me to get a grasp on. But as I start taking more “hard-core” IE classes, I get a better idea of some of the things involved.

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering are not concerned so much with designing products, but more in how products are produced. We are concerned with stuff like facility layout, determining how many operators to assign to a machine or how many machines to assign to an operator. We worry about inventory and figuring out how to meet production requirements based on sales forecasts. That's just a sample...

The joke was that David is a car geek, Tom is a computer geek, I am a math geek, and Kon…he’s just a geek.

Let’s modify my part in that equation. I officially am no longer a math geek, but a statistics geek. While related, there are some key differences. Math people delight in calculus and what's more, actually proving things like calculus. Stats, at least this brand, is more practically-oriented. IE is all about statistics, All four of my current classes (3 are IE classes) are delving or will delve into statistics. Stats, stats, stats. I’m getting warm fuzzies right now about them, though, so that’s a positive sign.

Even though I chafe at the thought of them, little social events centered around a theme really work. There was a welcome back barbeque this noon for IME (Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering) students. Barbequed hot dogs, a bunch of other junk food, it was great. I got acquainted with almost as many people in 20 minutes there than I had in months just hanging out going to class.

I wonder what Samson could have bench-pressed.

DO-SO-MI-FA (descending).

So we was sitting, yes we was, in the back of Monmouth Evangelical singing along with the piano and the organ and the preacher when all of the sudden I saw my name in the song! It said something like “By the angels and seraphs in heav’n adored.” Then a little later Kon pointed and said, “Hey, there’s Shannon’s name”: “Perfect.” Aw, shucks.

AHQ gave one of our last programs in the foreseeable future tonight. On the way over to Kon’s I was thinking. I was thinking about how much a part of human nature it is to want to be part of something bigger. Most everyone wants to be a part of a team, a group of people that are all working together for some larger purpose. You want to connect with others. We just have to connect with others. That’s what I loved so much about Chamber Choir at Linn-Benton. We had this very difficult music that we worked on all term and then we went out and performed it, made beautiful music…together.

For more than eight years, AHQ has been providing a concrete venue in which I am able to bond together with three other guys and make a positive impact on people’s lives. I hope I can sing with them until I die, but the day may come when AHQ ceases to exist. Here’s the thing, the “larger purpose” in my life doesn’t live and die with AHQ. It’s so much bigger than that. AHQ is just a way God has seen fit to use me presently, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be there forever. That's why Christianity--Jesus--is so...so reassuring. My larger purpose is serving Jesus Christ, wherever I'm at and whatever I'm doing. Like John Eldridge says, the problem is when we let the stuff of earth, the smaller stories, the less-wild lovers, become our end-all. No, no, no, Jesus is my end-all, come what may.