parklife

i was notified last week that my name was suggested to teach a workshop at 9 stake ysa conference in fargo next month. i found out this morning that it won't work out because they do not have the budget to fly me out. a let down, but being their first choice for such an opportunity is a great honors in itself.

a friend was commenting to me about uvsc's mascot. though they are officially the 'wolverines' , she said the statue on campus looks very much like an r.o.u.s.
i happened to see it last night. she's right.
[funny how most schools generally want viscious things to represent them; long live the moorhead spuds]

irrespective of the coolness of their mascot, they are not a very visitor-parking-friendly school. whereas byu has two adequately sized lots for visitors [which i enjoy almost daily] and many lots that open up to the public at 4 [and the rest at 7], uvsc's parking is enforced until 10 p.m. and their 'visitor' lot charges $2/hour.
but we learned that if you stay in said lot past 10 p.m., you don't have to pay.
= D

further, byu's traffic police are generally cooler. i have twice politely explained myself from $20 tickets to $5 fines, and once when i left church to help take a friend to the hospital and then back to centennial, i had forgotten that my bronco was left in the parking lot. not a problem on sunday, but when monday rolls around, that car suddenly becomes violatingly parked. i found 'the max' with a ticket on the windshield, but it was for $0. very cool, although i later suspected one of the devards were the merciful traffic cop and recognized my distinctive car.
cheers for awesome people.

nearly a year and a half ago, beej and i went to the r.e.m. concert at the 'e' center [we had 7th row seats; we were very excited]. as a die-hard fan, i knew every song they played but i didn't know the name of the last song they played before the encore. i hadn't been able to find the song until this week, when i was going through some old cds and found it. like removing a longstanding thorn, i feel relief from a burden i forgot i carried.
the song is 'life and how to live it' from 1985.

i have a habit of turning on the cable new channels while i eat breakfast. i don't know why, because it is either banal trivia or depressing gloom. but when i saw the story about the dog running for office some texas town, i knew today would be a good day.

walking to the library, i saw nine girls singing in front of the wilk. they're called 'noteworthy', and all-girl a capella group that i first saw a few weeks ago. i've never cared much for a capella, but they sound like nothing i have ever heard before. all of their arrangements are wonderful, and i want to buy their cd when it comes out.

yesterday was a beautiful day. today is a beautiful day. i love it. the sun was shining bright and brilliant as i was driving to campus, rocking out to they might be giants in my car. singing about that mass of incandescant gas, i thought out how rad the sun is.

'where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees'
inside the sun is [are?] tons and tons and tons of pressure. more pressure means the gas molecules move at a faster speeds. eventually, the atoms are moving and colliding so fast that the electromagnetic repulsion [i.e. protons repel] is overpowered and the strong nuclear forces take over, causing protons to fuse with other protons. hence the term 'nuclear fusion.' one proton by itself is called 'hydrogen'; two protons together become 'helium.' when this nuclear metamorphosis happens, an extreme amount of energy is released [think 'atom bomb'- same same but different].
this is really cool stuff. but what is even cooler still is that it doesn't end there. all that heat and pressure and energy just gives way to more fusion- helium begets lithium, which begets whatever comes next on the periodic table and so on. the sun creates larger and larger elements in its core until iron, where equilibrium is achieved, and there is not enough heat and pressure to overcome the resistance to adding any further protons.
'the sun is so hot that everything on it is a gas: aluminum, copper, iron, and many others'

my fascination with this led to becky nearly convincing to be a nuclear science dual major my senior year. but we looked into it and byu isn't too keen on students taking on a new major in their last semester.

with the oscars coming up, i sadly realized that i haven't seen any major nominees; and while i have no interest in even seeing brokeback mountain, i did think this is pretty fun [check out www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov, too]:



lastly, i just want to say, all your base are belong to us.