I want to do a “State of My Union” blog, but I need some time to construct.

So for now, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what I’m looking forward to for the next 11 weeks.

IE 337 is a Manufacturing Processes class. Paging through the textbook, it looks like some chemistry, at least at the beginning, and it’s almost a little reminiscent of physics, without the rigorous theory. But it’s a lot more relevant and practical than a general physics course, and some of the subjects explored would be immediately relevant to industry.

IE 366 is an Ergonomics class. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like, but this is as hard-core a design course as I imagine I’ll get in the Industrial Engineering course of study. But I don’t think it’s all that quantitative, so the material itself is going to have to be interesting for me to enjoy it. It’s the closest I’ll get to A&P (Anatomy and Physiology), too, all you health care types. We get to study the human body a little bit.

IE 411 is a Visual Basic programming class. I don’t know what to expect here at all. The department head has taken great pains to assure us that they will not turn us into bleary-eyed code-pounders. I’ve taken one other programming class in my life, and I liked a lot of it. But I’ve heard this guy piles on the work. We’ll see.

IE 356 is Design of Experiments, a class in which you use statistical techniques and analysis to improve processes and systems by running tests on them and, I assume, changing them accordingly. It should be fun; if I want a quantitative geek numbers class, then I should be in my glory. Some pages in the textbook have enough nasty mathematics to scare a calculus teacher. It could get old, though. It looked a little tiresome.

And then there’s NE (Nuclear Engineering) 319, which is a class about the contemporary issues raised by nuclear power. I can take it S/U (Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory), so I won’t be spending a whole lot of time on it. I couldn’t even find a textbook for it. But it should be a nice break from constant barrage of technical stuff in my other classes. Maybe we’ll get a little discussion going on, who know. It’s from 7-10 every Tuesday night.

2004. Wow. We hollered in the new year.

I love my youth group.

I still love cell phones, but I’m not obsessed.

Today is Kon and Shannon’s reception. I wish Tom were here.

A mantle of some sort may have been passed today. Rosie, the longstanding wild storyteller on aunt/nephew-niece excursions is married and in Poland at the moment. Aunt Barb didn’t seem to be too enthused to be the torch-bearer, so they made me tell a story.

Now, you must understand. There are prepared people and there are spontaneous people. I am a prepared person. A friend of mine told me so and I believe her.

But hey, I did it, and excepting for the end it went well, and that was only because Barb didn’t think that a tale like that should end in death, being a story for children and all. It was quite the story, sort of stupid, but that’s what those kind of stories are. Luckily for me, saying stupid things comes fairly easily for me. Smile.

I got pegged as a bleeding heart liberal last night. Nothing new really (I’ve heard the sentiment before, though the “bleeding heart” verbiage was a new twist), just a person who is pretty immersed in the “conservative” point of view. One of those (sort of like Tom) who, if you mention the word “liberal,” assumes it must necessarily be wrong, perhaps even evil.

And it was a family gathering, so we got loud and he got emphatic and I loved it.

I also love cell phones.

The latest in the “Impact My World” file.

Let’s say you become a Christian. Does that automatically equip you to effectively share the Gospel? Does a person automatically come to know the best ways to demonstrate Biblical truth, or even more basically, that the Bible is true?

Not necessarily.

God can certainly use an uneducated believer; that is sure. However, I think becoming equipped to witness by giving well-reasoned answers to tough questions is requisite to sharing your faith. You can’t engage the culture (be salt and light to the world) if you can’t explain why it makes sense to be a Christian (why Christ is God, that He truly rose from the dead, etc).

I wonder how equipped I am.

Of course, this also assumes that we are ready and able to give personal testimony to what God has done for us, because that is crucial as well.

Did I ever tell you I loved cell phones?

I love cell phones.

God basically says, "Make plans, but be ready to change them."

Where in the world does he get that, eh? Well, let's see.

James 4:13-15

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain"; whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that." (RSV)

My world sometimes seems a cluttered place, one with a million things unresolved and most of them apparently insurmountable, or at the least discouraging. But then I start, one by one, attacking those things in my life, slicing through the pile of books by my bed, the stack of papers on my desk, my list of things to do.

And I feel better. The inadequacy and discouragement melts in the glow of accomplishment, progress. To sit and feel bad about the road ahead, this just perpetuates a negative situation. But to run up that road with energy and hope, that'll just plain kick the bad attitude.

Little by little, inch by inch.
By the yard it's hard,
But an inch, what a cinch
Never look up the stairs, just step up the steps.
Little by little, inch by inch.

-Ron (& Shelley?) Hamilton (I'm guessing)

I’ll break from the normal format and give you a little play-by-play of yesterday.

I got home at 4:00 a.m. this morning. What a day, it was incredible. Patience has been the theme of the last two days for me, and God’s ways have seemed a little much. It was certainly an “extreme day” (eh, Randy?).

Night skiing started at 4 p.m. and we left from our house at 11:30 when it was estimated that it maybe would only take 3 hours to get to the ski place. Plenty of time, of course. But I didn’t get out on the slopes until nearly 5, almost 5.5 hours after we left. This was due to bad roads, confusion concerning parking and waiting in regards to renting equipment.

So we had our 5 hours on the slopes until about 10. Some fun stuff, I caught some air (just a little), skiied fairly swiftly, fell sprawling a few times, had a good time.

At the point, the night was just like a newborn though, a premature one at that. Really, like baby that was born months early.

First of all, we lost Dave because of a gross miscommunication.

Here was the deal, normally you think the more the merrier. But I’ve come to the conclusion that unless you have major organization, go skiing in a small group. We had 16.

So Dave was searching for the two guys that rode up with him while they had been whisked away to the Annex parking lot with some of the others. Most of us rendezvoused at the Annex, but no Dave. Finally, maybe 45 minutes later he showed up, the lone passenger on a big ‘ol shuttle bus. So I think we finally left at a little after 11.

At this point, the night was like a newborn.

We strike off, a caravan of four cars, and promptly get separated into two sub-caravans of two cars each. Thankfully, I was in the forward sub-caravan and was following someone who knew the way home. But soon we discovered that the back sub-caravan had taken a wrong turn and was headed toward Idaho.

Problem was, Kevin was in my rig, but his keys (which he needed to get home) were in the Beth’s car, which was in the lost sub-caravan. Additionally, Randy--my brother--was also in the lost sub-caravan. So we couldn’t just go home and let them find their way by themselves. We were going to have to meet them where we initially met and launched this ill-fated tour.

So we decided to stop and eat because we were so far ahead of the lost sub-caravan.

We must have waited 20 minutes to be seated, and then another 20 or 25 before our orders were taken. Though located in a small town, this Denny’s was hopping at 1 a.m., and the restaurant was sorely understaffed. We were in the restaurant for close to two hours, and we didn’t linger at all.

In the meantime, the lost sub-caravan discovered that as we waited in the restaurant they had driven much closer to home that we were, and so, to avoid having to sit and wait for us, they decided to stop and eat themselves.

Again, because of gross miscommunication, they lingered at their restaurant. So we arrived home at our meeting place and had to wait for 25 minutes for the lost sub-caravan to arrive.

All that equals many memories made.

Then today we were going to exchange our cell phones for some flip-phones for a nice price, but due to complications we have to wait until next week.

Enough of that.

I was looking back over some old e-mails that I had written and I was struck by something I wrote back in June of 2002.

“I don't think I've ever truly been torn about what to do for an extended period of time in my life.”

How things change. I can now say that I’ve truly been torn about what to do for an extended period of time in my life. The decision to not go (splitting infinitives is permissible, i.e. “to boldly go where no man has gone before”) to SMBI was probably the most excruciating of my life.