First Field Experience

Well, I had my orientation this morning at the UW, and was given my placement for the first in-classroom field experience. I will be spending two weeks, starting tomorrow morning at 7:30am, at Skyview Junior High School, which is in Canyon Park and is a part of the Northshore School District.

I met with my site coordinator today and am very exicted about this first experience. The school seems like it will be great, my coordinator's great, and I'll be in an 8th grade science class, so that's cool.

I now need to eat lunch, and then figure out what I'll need to do to get ready, which will probably involve going "teacher clothes" shopping. More info to come, so stay tuned!

2 Heads better than 1?

That's what they say, but I'm not sure that applies to baseball games. Today marked the first ever double header in Safeco Field history. Something new for all of us working there, myself included. Thankfully, I wasn't there for all 12 innings of the second game. I got to leave about 6pm to head out to Snoqualmie for Megan and Jeff's engagement party. So I was only at the Safe for 7 hours. : )

The party was cool. Got to have some good ice cream and lots of great toppings, and I got to see Megan, Jeff, Ingrid, and James. Granted, there were other people at the party, but most of them were family of Megan and Jeff, so I didn't really know them. That's ok, I still had a good time and it game me a good excuse to see some friends. : )

The one part of the party that got me a bit nervous was the required craft (Gary said we couldn't leave until we completed the craft). I'd try to explain it to you, but seeing as I had trouble understanding it myself until I saw it, you'll just have to imagine something involving fingers, paint, a platter, and ice cream.

Tomorrow morning I'm running sound for "big church" which involves getting there early. I'm sure it'll be fine, but I'm always nervous, especially since I haven't done it in a while. I hope I can remember how to do everything, especially using the compressor and how to make the CD burner work to record the message. Oh well, I'll do my best, and that's all I can do! After church I get to rush over to Safeco Field again to work the M's game. I guess whoever was supposed to be there can't be, so I'll get there when I can and work 'till the game's over. Never a dull moment for me!

And just for those who are wondering, my UW orientation for the MIT program is Tuesday, on which day I'll find out about my first field experience: when I start and what school I'll be in. I'll keep ya'll posted when I know more.

Silly Me

I just remembered! The reason blogger won't update my profile is because I didn't use blogger to post it! (some of you know that I'm a detail person. Here's a warning: details some of you don't care about are what follows:) When blogger updated and got all it's new templates I messed around w/ it's profile option, but it made too much info public that I didn't want. It also put a link to Ben's profile, which I also didn't want, but couldn't find a way to remove. So to get around this, I manually inserted my profile in the template code. As far as blogger's concerned, I don't have a profile set to display on my blog. Updating my profile is something I'll have to do manually if I want it done. Now why didn't I remember that sooner?!

From comment to Post

In an attempt to have something to post, I'm going to expand on the comments made for my last post.

I know that my profile is out of date; I have in fact graduated from SU and will start my UW stuff next Tuesday, actually. However, I have a problem w/ updating my profile: blogger won't post the change. Several weeks ago (or months?) I actually did go in and change my profile in blogger. Made it more current. It still wasn't very exciting, since I don't want to publish my whole life on here, but at least it was accurate.

But back to the problem. For some reason, I can't get blogger to update my profile. Even in blogger, my profile is the new one, but on my blog it's still the old (as I'm sure you can see). I've made numerous posts since the change, as well as using the "rebublish entire blog" option, to no avail. So I'm stumped. Any ideas?

If you blog it, they will come

I don't know how true that is, but I'm willing to give it a try. I was told that if I post more often, I'll get more readers. But I still have a sneaky suspicion that I have more "closet readers" (those who read but don't comment) than commenting readers, which is fine, but then I don't know if I'm just typing to oblivion.

On to the (more) interesting part of the post. Today I went into work at BCS and helped do some reorgonizing, as well as selling books. It was tollerable because Megan was there. : ) Honnestly, I don't know how Ingrid did it by herself. The job's not hard, and Linda is really great to work for, but the tasks themselves are kinda' mind-numbing. Without having another person to talk to, it'd be really hard.

Oh, ok, time for a Ryan Rant. So I e-mailed my boss before I left for Trek asking for Wednesday and Thursday's games off. When I got back, the schedule had me off on Tuesday and Wednesday. So I e-mailed the other grip on Sunday to ask that he switch games with me. Monday comes, and I haven't heard anything. So Monday night I send him a second e-mail, asking again, and requesting that he let me know either way. So today, Tuesday, comes, and still no e-mail! Granted he could have not checked his e-mail, but that's not wise, since he could get an e-mail from my boss about working another game or something. But it still remains, I didn't get any e-mail from him, so all day long I was wondering if I was working the game tonight. Wondering, hoping to find out, but nothing.

I really hate it when people don't reply to an e-mail that's time sensitive, or call you back, or wait and assume they'll see you later or something. Sometimes they do, but other times it doesn't happen, and then I'm left wondering if I'm supposed to go or stay or whatever. I'm the type of person who likes to plan, even if it's my next couple of hours. When all I'm doing is waiting on someone's response, I can't get anything done during those hours, because I'm constantly wondering if I'll hear from the person. All I want is a simple yes or know!! Or even a message/call/whatever telling me they won't know until such-and-such a time. It's the unknown that's the worst!!!

Ok, so that rant wasn't too extreeme. I'll work up to it. : )

Nearly Hairless Ryan

Some of you have already seen me, but for those that haven't, I had a sort of drastic change that occured while I was on the Summer Trek mission trip last week. Have no fear, though I don't plan to keep it this way, though I'm not quite sure what I am going to do.

The trip as a whole was good, although it was odd. God worked in some very non-traditional ways, but He got ahold of student's hearts and was able to teach the group how to work together as a team (which is more than some teams of adults I've been on).

I'll be getting more pictures later this week, hopefully, so I may post a few more from the trip up here later this week. That's assuming there are enough people who read this to make it worth my while...

Home Stretch

The end of summer is unfortunatly in sight. Booksales at BCS starts tomorrow. That should be "fun." Megan and Ingrid will both be there, so that's one plus. After what will probably be a long-ish day there, I'll drive back down into Seattle for the M's game again. First game of the Yankees series; should be interesting.

On a side note, I take great pride in hating the Yankees, but I now have a dilema: John Olerude is a Yankee, and I really like him! Up 'till now, there hasn't been anyone of the team that I've really liked, so I've never had a problem hating them. But now that John's there, I can't completly hate the team. It'll definatly be weird to see him in a Yankees uniform!

Back to my life...after the game tomorrow night, I'll high-tail it back home so I can pack for Trek. Saturday I'll be at church by noon, and leave by about 12:45 on Summer Trek, the junior high service mission trip. Any spare prayers would be appreciated. On the whole, this week has been much more restful than I expected--God's been good. However, when I got home from the game today (it was a day game so I had time this evening to chill) I quickly fell asleep on the couch, not realizing how tired I actually was.

So, I guess that's about it. I'll be gone from Saturday to Saturday. I then have one week (w/ the M's in town again) until I start stuff for my graduate program, but I'll give more details on that later.

Ok, I think I'll do a bit more reading while I wait for my current laundry load to finish.

Not much, though there should be

I haven't updated my blog in a while, but that's mostly because not much worth posting has happened. That, and right after post-worthy events I've been too tired/lazy to actually write a post. : )

One exciting thing that happened this last weekend was my dad's suprise 50th birthday party. We've been planing it since April, so it was cool to finally see it come together. It went well, although there weren't as many people there as we hoped. He would have been suprised if his boss haddn't called him 45 minutes before he got to the party to tell him happy birthday (his b-day still isn't for 2 more weeks). I guess the guy though that since he was going to be late he'd call...but the odd thing is, he still showed up for the party. Not only that, we told everyone to arrive at 4pm, and that dad would be there about 4:30; the guy called my dad at about 4:15! Not too bright, huh? Oh well. My dad enjoyed it, and that's the most important part.

Let's see, what else? The Mariners are back in town tomorrow. I'm supposed to work Tuesday thru Friday, but I may give up a game or two for someone else to work. Normally I wouldn't probably be so nice, but I'm leaving for Summer Trek (prayers please) on Saturday, so not working like crazy right before I leave would be a good thing. 'Course, the bookstore hasn't been crazy like I thought it would be either. Booksales start on Friday and Megan and I had nothing to do on Friday or today, and so haven't gone in to work. It's nice to have the time at home, but it'd be nice to be getting paid, too.

Ok, enough pointless rambling. I'm getting together to hang w/ Wes today, so that should be cool. My chance to see him before he heads off to Stanford to start work on his doctorate (impressive, huh?).