Realization is better than Anticipation

Sorry for the delay. I have had a few opportunities to write on here, but to be honest, I'm not entirely motivated to write stuff. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but as far as I can tell, the number of people who read this are counted on one hand, and I talk to a few of those relatively consistently. Nontheless, I don't suppose that's a legitimate reason for not writing a bit more frequently. So, in conclusion, give me some fodder in the form of responses to my posts to motivate further entries.

Now then, stuff that's going on. There has been a big flap on campus about the CEO's pay increase of 47% from last year. I'm not well informed on the issue, I'm not familiar with the context, and it doesn't really interest me anyway, but it sure is causing quite a stir on campus. There will be meetings and such open to students and faculty in the coming days, with rumors going about of resignations and so forth. It all seems a bit ridiculous to me, since the CEO requested his pay be returned to the previous level (once the information became a hot topic of course). But anyway, you all in the Christian Science community may be hearing things.

Personally, I've been working pretty hard in school, writing papers, lots of reading, researching for a couple presentations I have, and being pretty busy socially too. I'm doing well so far academically, but there is still a ways to go before the end. It is currently 5th week in the quarter (10th being the last week in the quarter), so it's crunch time right now. I'm reading a biography about Mary Baker Eddy written by Sibyl Wilbur. Briefly, I don't find the book very good as a book. Yes, the information within the book is itself interesting, but it is presented with a style of writting that just doesn't work for anything but the time period it was written in (published in 1907). The book was basically commissioned to be a response to the biography written by Georgine Milmine, a book that casts MBE rather negatively. The church asked Wilbur to write this book, and it definitely carries a positive bias towards MBE. Alas, everything is biased it seems.

We watched most of An Inconvenient Truth in class yesterday. 'Twas my first time watching it, and it was pretty strong I think. Yes, it too carries a bias, and one that I agree with, and he does indeed have a lot of fantastic information supporting his point, always from credible sources. However, I have to admit there are a few points where additional referencing or context would have either made his point stronger OR presented something not supporting him that would still at least give Gore more credibility in that it would not show him to be as biased as he obviously is. Hooray for long-winded sentences! I also have to write a paper and give a presentation in that class about pineapples: ecological/economic/social context, and facts about it like how it's grown, where it's native, etc.

This past Sunday I played in my 2nd Intramural basketball game. So, I live in Lowrey, we're the only house on campus that has TWO basketball teams, thus I can accurately say we played ourselves on Sunday. Team 1 v. Team 2. I'm on team 1. Team 1 won. It was a lot of fun really, we just played randomly a lot, not really calling fouls too much, taking ridiculous shots a lot, and Team 1 played at a man disadvantage of 6 to 8. 14 guys on the court at once sure makes it interesting. Lots of fun though. I scored a bunch, but we weren't really keeping track.

Saturday night I went to "Jo Down." It's hosted by Jo McNabb house in a barn building down in Elsah, and it's just several hours of fun dancing (mostly line dancing), free food/drinks from an establishment in Alton, and free bandanas for everyone! Of course, I had to dress as a cowboy. I had a black hat, plaid shirt, jeans, and I wore the FREE bandana in the manner of a cowboy bandit (covering the face). It was a lot of fun, there are pictures of me, but I didn't take them so I don't have them yet.

Oh yes! Last...Tuesday I believe...I went on an all-day field trip to the St. Louis Zoo for my Wildlife Conservation class. A rather appropriate venue for such a topic. We did have some work to do while we were there, but we finished it early and just enjoyed seeing everything there. It was sad to see many of the animals, spending their lives in glass enclosures. Some of them were almost certainly not there mentally. It had snowed days before we went, and you could tell the tiger had walked probably hundreds of times since the snow in the same pattern, with some change in the pattern once in a while too. The zoo does work hard to keep the animals engaged, to be sure. One of the easiest ways for the zoo to do this is to make the act of getting food a very time consuming process. They also interact with the animals too, knowing zoo animals will NEVER themselves be realeased into the wild (thus it's not too much of a big deal if they lose their fear of humans). I did take pictures, but most turned out pretty bad. Here's a few of the better ones: