I talked with Nate "Mr. Photogenic" Miller at GFT in BG yesterday. I had yesterday and today off because of the "end of fiscal year." So I had two "use them or lose them" days. This was great. I really needed a day or two off, and these just happened to coincide with the weather turning warmer and a strong desire to work on the dissertation.

I changed the oil in the Civic yesterday, worked on the dissertation (the analysis is COMPLETE with graphs). Then I went to BG to talk with Rich (my advisor) and see people. Man, I miss BG people. They are extremely fun people.

After looking around for months, I finally ordered a new digital camera to replace my failing, old, heavy, huge Olympus that has burned out pixels and a crack in the case. I got the Canon SD300, which looked to be the best super-compact available in terms of picture quality and second-best in speed. Man, it will be nice to have a decent camera for the youth trips, summer stuff, and those miscellaneous things that come up. It should come tomorrow! Woohoo. Now to get a huge SD card...

I got a package of rather neat-looking strawberries. After small modification, this one resembled a person from the comics.

This has been a rather fun and real week. I did not leave work feeling depressed about life EVEN ONCE. Maybe I am getting used to it. Or maybe things are genuinely fun and people (or me) are changing and becoming more fun.

The realness of life has come from church people. The stuff happening at Zoar is wonderful, real, and fulfilling.

Anne's birthday was good. The big event was that we got to welcome a new member into our family--Anne got a very good flute. It took a lot of thought and head-scratching, but I am glad we finally got it. The old Yamaha was getting beyond its useful life and was not a large-level enough instrument for Anne anymore.

It has been a babyful time. I got to hold little La'Keisha for about an hour on Sunday...and she didn't even cry (much). I can see how people could like those little things, but they sure seem like a lot of work (worthwhile work, though!).

Hey, it is Anne's birthday. Make sure you give her lots of good presents (like a heavy-duty car jack, tire gauge, digital camera, and sweet remote-controlled boat).

Allison and Seth (Sapp-Lindeman)are staying with us today (Monday). Of course, they brought their baby, Lucas. Did you know that babies get neater as they get older? I didn't know that. Allison and Seth are really neat to have around (if only for a little while). They are college friends (Anne used to live with Allison) who now live just outside of Kansas City. Seth is a minister and is trying to establish a church. What neat people!

I just got done with the youth men's Bible study I lead. I am amazed to see how the group is growing, both as individuals and in scope of what they do as members of the Church. Our church (see www.ZoarLutheran.com) has been sweet lately too. We were there for about 13 hours yesterday between a super-long and special church "planning for the future" service to a youth concert at the end of the day. Things are really gaining momentum over at Zoar--and it is a gift to be a part of it.

This is one heck of an invisible value!

We used a lot of these tapes at last week's 30 hour famine with the church youth. 30,000 children die daily of starvation. This was part of an exercise (to make a chain link where every link = 10 children) to try to get our minds around how incredibly large this number really is. It was a lot. A whole, whole lot. It stretched all over the church.

Overall, it was a good weekend. Fasting (for only 30 hours, even) focuses your mind in interesting ways.

Work is getting less depressing. I think I have gotten to the point where I simly accept that I will be very depressed about working there for at least one or two days of the week. Things were pretty fun this past week because I am doing more work that I should be doing (writing, analysis) and less of the tedious code-running that I am unprepared for and unexcited to get frustrated about. I will be taking tuesday off to go to BG and get in a dissertation meeting with Rich. This 3 experiment * 2 measurements * 2 analyses per measure is getting to be a bit crazy because each analysis requires a different dataset!