I'm glad that I got out last night to check out the campus a bit. The weather was very pleasant. I had a couple nostalgia moments when I walked through the University center, not because I've been here before, but because there were students wandering around in slippers and things like that... stuff that you see on a residential campus and never on a commuter campus. I thought about trying to crash the InterVarsity group here, but they meet on Friday evenings, and I'll be gone by then.
But now, I'm sitting in my room at the Washington Duke Inn, watching Duke play Colorado State on TV (because there's no way I was going to be able to get tickets to this game). I'm here because I'm part of the National Governors Association Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (NGA STEM) Summit. It's going well, and I'm having a lot of interesting conversations, but it's going to cause an increase in the amount of work I'm going to have to do when I get back because I'm going to have to have a bunch of other conversations with other people. The day started at 8 AM and went until about 7:30 PM (which for me is 5 AM to 4:30 PM), and I've got another full day tomorrow, then a half day on Friday, and then a long flight home. Saturday, I go to campus to grade exams, and review some more applications. Pretty soon, the semester will be over so I can... ummmmm... keep right on working.
I'm missing finals week right now. This is a new one. I'd actually rather be there than here, but here isn't really that bad. It's really cold in Las Vegas right now, with temperatures in the low 30s. The room here is nice, the bed is comfortable, and I have free and mostly reliable internet. This trip is the second of my run of trips. The first one was going home for Thanksgiving. I got to meet my nephew in person for the first time, which was nice. He's cute, but if you want to see pictures you'll have to be friends with Corwin or Mandy. They've got plenty of pictures and I anticipate they will have plenty more.
I had turkeys three ways this year. The fried turkey still wins. And it's not really that close. It's tough to beat fried turkey. I still need to work on the smoked turkey. The flavor wasn't as sweet as what I remembered from the first time I did it for GCF a long time ago. Now *THAT* turkey could have competed with the fried turkey. I don't know if I'll ever get that one back, though. I may have to try smoking some chickens over the next year to work out what brine/smoke combinations work well.
Church things are rolling along. Where we're rolling to, I'm not sure. We still don't have an interim pastor or a senior pastor, which is making it hard for staff to really set out a direction for anything. We had a Christmas musical ("Word on the Street") which was entertaining. It was one of the many Christmas story re-tellings that are out there, this one in an urban setting. I'm not quite sure what else to say about it. On the kid's end, it looks like we're creating a children's worship service and pulling them back out of the adult service. It seems like the right move, since we've now reduced the children's participation to a single song before sending them off in prayer.
I guess that's all I've got right now. I'll be back in Vegas on Friday night, and then back in Livermore on December 22, Vegas on the 27th, Boston on January 4th, and back to Vegas on January 7th.
