rose for rosie

one of the roses given to dr. j at her retirement/our graduating party.

cohort closing down

the crew, minus chrissy.

we took this same photo last year:


here are some other old photos of us... it's crazy how much you change in just 2 years. here's the first group shot we took.


and here's one from last spring...


two years. it's almost over. and these 7 years of undergrad as well.

kimbo and lilly

sometimes pictures you take just come out perfectly.

my personality

if you've ever wondered what makes me tick, how to get along with me, why i'm the way i am, etc. read these links:

http://keirsey.com/personality/nfip.html

http://typelogic.com/infp.html

"Healers are found in only 1 percent of the general population, although, at times, their idealism leaves them feeling even more isolated from the rest of humanity."

no kidding!

take the test yourself and lemme know what your personality type is. i've been into this stuff since... high school?

egyptian theatre

i think they have the sundance film festival here. it's very unassuming and in the middle of all the other shops on main street.

olympic park snow

snow up to my knees


falling


cold and wet

salt lake city days 3, 4, and 5

the credit for this amazing shot of the mormon temple goes to brit randolph. i left my camera at home, but don't think i could have captured it as well as she did. i think she brightened it a little with picasa, but the fog is amazing.

wasn't feeling so good friday morning, thus the blog entry from that morning. i finally made myself walk to the conference center where i took in some poster sessions and a talk on using technology to teach students with aspergers. i went to lunch alone and ended up running into cindy, a doctoral student at kansas who went to georgia college a few years ago. a friend of hers is in the doctoral program at vanderbilt, which is in nashville. turns out she's doing her research in the school district i want to get a job in. i gave her a copy of my resume and she put me into contact with the special education directors. we'll see what happens. dr. childre and dr. jackson say i should do grad work at vandy... i'm not sure i'm cut out for it, but we'll see what happens. everything from the week is kinda running together. brett, emilie and i went to eat with the juniors at hard rock friday night. the dork that i am named 18 out of 19 songs that they played. i think the other one was the ravonettes, but i took it as an "i don't know."


(brett and i do not take serious pictures. i was holding up brit's name tag. i have no idea why he held up the ketchup.)

i had the idea that we could all go to park city on saturday to see the shops, art galleries, and olympic park. it ended up being brett and davis and i going on our own. i would have gotten an suv because they were cheaper and a lot more stylish than a ford minivan had i known others had already gone without us, but it made for a lot of jokes when i picked cindy and the juniors up for lunch. i became "soccer dad," and i watched my children closely with the stow-away curving child mirror.


here's my wonderful parallel parking job at lunch. there might have been two feet of room up front. (i did not touch either car.)

we went to park city after our presentation and lunch, and the drive there was breathtaking. i love georgia and think the area around camp is some of the prettiest i've ever seen, but snow covered mountains are something else. driving into park city makes you realize there are a lot of really rich people in america. there are some huge houses in those valleys and on the sides of the mountains.

we spent most of our time in park city looking at amazing art in the many art galleries. davis pointed to a bronze bear sculpture that looked like it was laughing as it broke wind. sure enough, the piece was titled "instink." we soon discovered that it would be really easy to spend a lot of money if you had $100,000 or so to burn on a saturday. if they have art for sale by an artist i've heard of, you know it's worth a lot.

on the way back to salt lake city, we stopped at the olympic park. sadly the place closes down at 4 o'clock (on a saturday) so we didn't get to ride the insanely long zip line down the slope. we got to see the ski jumps and bobsled track from the parking lot, and play in the snow along the road up to the venue. it made a good conclusion to the trip to utah.

davis and i went to see the benchwarmers, i took brett to the airport, and after making an appearance at the senior girls' dinner, i called it a night. woke up at 6 to pack up, return the rental van, and get a little breakfast before heading to the airport with davis, kaci, and ashley. delta lost my bag, and after waiting for a long time to file a claim, i finally made it home to athens a little after midnight.

it's easy to define life moments by songs. i heard this song i really liked the other day, but didn't know who sang it. it was playing in a end of a movie when i walked in the hotel room, so i waited until the credits got to the music part and was shocked to find it was crooner michael bublé. not usually my style, but "home" is a dang good song. so we go downstairs for dinner thursday, and they're playing a michael bublé concert dvd. i heard the song about 5 times while in salt lake city, and yesterday it really fit. i was ready to come home. albums that are great for flying include coldplay's "x&y" and death cab for cutie's "plans."

more pictures to come. and probably more stories to tell as i remember them.

*i was going to complain about having to wait for over an hour looking for my bag and standing in line to file a lost luggage claim, but i just got a call from the macon airport saying that they have my bag. they're going to deliver it late tonight.

salt lake city, day two

so we woke up yesterday morning pretty early, watched the local news for a while. local news is always funny to watch. one particular station has what they call the "weather porch." it seemed like they got their weather from their drive to the station and what other people were saying, cause all they talked about was so and so who called in from so and so and said the weather was like so and so. anyway, they said it might snow in the higher elevations, but just rain in the valley. they were wrong. shortly after breakfast, this was the scene.

brett and i decided to walk the 4 blocks to the convention center in the snow, and we were dripping wet by the time we got there. it was interesting none the less.


we came back to the hotel after lunch to drop our bags of free stuff and so brett could put on his suit for their poster presentation, and there was snow all over the ground. this is the park across from our hotel. fyi, dress shoes do not work well in the snow. i almost fell down numerous times. we took a cab the rest of the day while it snowed/rained.





here's the view from the room after several hours of snow. the temperature was above freezing, but it was snowing so hard it started to accumulate a little.

here's kaci, ashley, brett, and emilie at their presentation. they had a lot of people praising their work, and offering to buy copies of their diversity tool kit. they had professors telling them they were going to make their grad level students read their project.

we went to hear the mormon tabernacle choir practice last night. i forgot my camera, which i'm kicking myself over. their convention center is the largest auditorium in the world, seating 21,000 people. that's a lot of mormons! it sounded like any other choir practice, going through the music line by line, but they did manage to sing complete songs right before we left. we went to eat at pf chang's, and finally got our food around 10 local time (midnight in georgia). we had a lot of fun at dinner, and slept very well last night.

this morning's news didn't disappoint either. one of the local stations has a guy simply known as "big budah." he was at some karate competition where he bounced all these black belt dudes off his belly. it wasn't very funny...

i'm about to head over to the conference. we're talking about renting a van tomorrow and going to see park city. it's supposed to be a really neat resort town.

salt lake city, day one

so rather than drive to atlanta last night like i had planned, i stayed up until 1 am finishing the project that i'm presenting on saturday at the conference. which means i woke up at 5:30 to drive to atlanta to catch my flight. i had some checks i needed to deposit, so i went on search for a wachovia. an hour later, i found myself in austell, where i knew there was a bank. then came the joy of finding a park n ride type place that had an open parking space. finally did that, finally made it to the airport. our little (i mean little, there were maybe 45 people on it. each row had 3 seats... 1 seat, isle, 2 seats) plane pulled up to the gate and i got a little nervous. davis had never flown before, so i was interested to see how well the both of us would do on a little plane. after takeoff, it ended up being the smoothest flight of my life.

other than houston's airport being really ghetto, connecting was no problem at all. we grabbed a little mcdonalds and found our plane already boarding when we got to the gate. the flight was smooth until we were about 200 miles out, which is when we hit the front that's been dumping rain all over the west. needless to say we bounced around through the end of the flight. met brett and larissa at the airport, and the 4 of us took a taxi to the hotel. it's the smoothest taxi ride i've ever been on, he drove really slow. brett says it was the old van we were in, but i gave him the benefit of the doubt and said he was a good driver.

our hotel is a homewood suites by hilton. and it's brand new, they've only been open a month or so. this is the nicest place i've ever stayed. and the beauty of being a guy in an education program is we don't have to share the room with as many people as the girls are. we each get a bed, with the junior davis getting the pull out couch. the clock may only say 9:20, but it's more like 11:20 to me, and i've been up since 5:30, so i'm going to bed now. more tomorrow. at some point i'm going to rent a car and go see park city. it's supposed to be pretty close.

that's right, there's still snow in the mountains. the great salt lake is in the top right corner.


first thing we have when we walk in is the kitchen, complete with full size fridge and dishwasher


comfy couch and flat screen, wide screen tv.


mine and brett's beds. they're very comfortable. not sure what you're supposed to do with 5 pillows though... (there were 2 more in the closet for the pull out bed.)


oh, and the bedroom has an identical tv. there's wireless internet, but it's too weak, so i just plugged. the cable was already in the wall.

goodnight!

something about a big salt lake

today was my last day of student teaching. i wasn't as sad as i was on katie's last day.

i'm off for salt lake city. pray for safe travel and my nerves prior to and during flight. i shall return sunday night with my mormon brides.

andersonville 2

13,000 union soldiers died at the prison. rather than receive a proper burial, they were placed shoulder to shoulder in shallow trenches. that's why the headstones are so close together. clara barton (who founded the red cross) went back to place the headstones a few years later.


groups of union soldiers known as "the raiders" stole, murdered, and terrorized the other prisoners. six were arrested and tried by other union soldiers, hanged, and buried separate from the other union soldiers.


there were a lot of these.


there are monuments all over the place. this one was really creepy looking. it had a nice verse at the bottom though. "turn you to the stronghold ye prisoners of hope," zechariah 9:12. most of the monuments were commissioned around the turn of the century by northern states in honor of their fallen soldiers. wisconsin had the largest one by far.

i fly out of atl wednesday morning for salt lake city. i present during a poster session on saturday morning with brett and a professor. other than that i plan on attending a few talks and enjoying salt lake city a little more than i did last year when we went to baltimore.

bulb

from the lake laurel field trip